Today, Wednesday 26 May, there are presidential elections in Syria: or rather, in those parts of Syria still under the control of President Bashar al Assad, who has ruled in an authoritarian way since 2000 and who will certainly get his fourth term. The elections can be considered neither free nor democratic, and have been defined as a farce by practically everyone, including the governments of the United States, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom: Assad’s rivals are in fact Abdullah Salloum Abdullah and Mahmoud Ahmad Marie , two politicians very little known and included among the candidates only to give a semblance of regularity to the vote and greater legitimacy to the regime.
Today’s are the second presidential elections that have been held in Syria since 2011, the year of the beginning of the war between the Assad regime and the rebel groups that wanted it to be removed. The first, also a farce, took place in the midst of the fighting in 2014: Assad had obtained 89 percent of the vote, with a turnout of more than 73 percent. Today Assad is even more firmly in power than he was then – when his regime was on the verge of crumbling through defections in the army, the rise of ISIS and the advance of the rebels – also because the vast majority of its opponents are abroad to escape the repression of the Syrian secret police (“mukhabarat”).
Despite the fact that in recent years Assad has strengthened his power, thanks above all to the help of Russia and Iran, the Syrian regime today it controls only a part of the territory it controlled in 2011, at the beginning of the war: about 40 percent of Syria is in fact ruled by other groups and more than half of the Syrian population lives in areas not controlled by the regime (both inside and outside Syria).
In the northern and western territories, controlled by the anti-Assad rebels (dark green), by the forces financed and supported by Turkey in an anti-Kurdish function (light green) and by the Kurds (yellow), there will be no vote, while in some territories under regime control, including the southern provinces of Daraa and Sweida, many objected to the elections as “illegitimate”.
The current situation in Syria: in red the Assad regime and its allies, in yellow the Kurds, in light green in the north the groups supported and financed by Turkey in an anti-Kurdish function, in dark green in the west the faction-dominated rebels radicals and jihadists (Liveuamap)
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The elections are being held in a country not only extremely divided, but also with an economy in free fall and with a health system under great pressure from the pandemic.
The Syrian economy has been hit hard by the war, by the sanctions imposed against the Assad regime by several Western countries, by the widespread government corruption, by the effects of the pandemic and from the severe economic and financial crisis in Lebanon, that for numerous reasons it has also had enormous effects on Syria. Today a large part of the Syrian population lives in poverty, inflation is very high and power outages are longer than they were during the war, due to the lack of foreign currency that prevents the regime from importing fuel. . The situation is also very critical for the national health system, severely affected by the pandemic: among other things, in the last three months the intensive care units of the hospitals in Damascus have reached their maximum capacity and doctors have been forced to transfer many patients. in the structures of other provinces.
In the next seven years, the duration of the presidential mandate, Assad will not have to deal only with the divisions in Syria and the deep crisis in which the Syrian economy has entered: another theme will be the influence of Russia and Iran in the territories controlled by the regime .
During the Syrian war, in fact, the Assad regime survived only thanks to the military aid received from Russia, which had made its warplanes available to bomb the areas controlled by the rebels, and from Iran, which had guaranteed the regime the presence of pro-Iranian Shiite militias and the powerful radical Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah (ally of Iran). This is why many experts, including Lina Khatib of the Chatham House think tank, believe that Assad’s re-election should not be seen as a show of strength, but as a demonstration of influence and power on the part of Iran and especially Russia: “If Russia hadn’t wanted Assad’s re-election, it would have derailed the elections,” Khatib said.
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