In the aftermath, Mr. al-Assad will be declared the victor over his two hand-picked “rivals.” If history is any guide, the official figures will claim that more than 90 per cent of the country voted for Mr. al-Assad.
For Mr. al-Assad and his loyalists, May 26 will mark a day of triumph. After 10 years of horrific war, their totalitarian system remains improbably intact, at least in the parts of the country under the régime’s control.
Those who oppose the régime say Wednesday won’t mark the end of their struggle, which began 10 years ago when a group of teenagers in the southern city of Daraa spray-painted “it’s your turn doctor” on the wall of their school. It was a reference to the toppling of other dictators around the Middle East in a series of uprisings known as the Arab Spring. Zine El Abedine Ben Ali had been forced to flee Tunisia. Hosni Mubarak had been jailed in Egypt. Many Syrians believed then that Mr. al-Assad, an ophthalmologist by training, would be the next to fall.
But the staged vote will provide a harsh reality check – a reminder of how much ground the rebels have lost since the heady days of 2013 and 2014 when change felt imminent. The process is seen as a signal to Syria’s opposition – and the international community – that Mr. al-Assad and his régime aren’t going anywhere.
“The régime thinks that it can force the result of this election on us, and the international community will start to give up [on Syria],” said Hadi al-Bahra, who served in 2014 as the president of the Syrian National Council, an umbrella group representing a kaleidoscope of rebel groups and pro-democracy forces. Mr. al-Bahra was also a top opposition negotiator through several rounds of failed peace talks with representatives of the régime.
The Syria that Mr. al-Assad presides over is a shattered country. Ten years of war have left more than 500,000 people dead or missing, and the ongoing violence has driven more than 12 million others – more than half the country’s prewar population – from their homes. The economy is a broken mess, needing tens of billions of dollars in investment just to return it to its prewar state, when it was already one of the poorest countries in the region.
It’s also a country that the régime, which is backed by Russia and Iran, can only claim to govern parts of. Russia’s military intervention, which began in 2015, helped save Mr. al-Assad’s forces from defeat and aided their recapture of key cities such as Aleppo, Homs and Daraa. But the east of the country is run by the Kurdish forces allied to the U.S., while the northwest province of Idlib and much of the border zone remain are controlled by rebel groups with Turkish military posts protecting them inside Syrian territory.
“Anybody who can claim victory in Syria should be put into a mental institution,” Mr. al-Bahra said in a telephone interview.
Oussama Chourbagi briefly lived in a free Syria, or a corner of it. In the first three years of the conflict, the activist – who was trained as a pharmacist in France but returned to his country at the outset of the uprising – was part of the local council in Daraya. The Damascus suburb was one of the first areas to escape Mr. al-Assad’s grasp. Unlike other parts of Syria, where the once-peaceful uprising quickly turned to violence as the régime kept shooting at its opponents, Daraya placed its armed groups under civilian control.
“We wanted to create a small example to us and to the international community that we can manage and we can control our area, because the [narrative] of the régime was, ‘if we don’t want Bashar al-Assad, you will have Islamist groups, it will be a mess, you will have chaos.’ I can say that we reached 80 per cent of our goal in Daraya … any decisions taken were taken by the majority,” Mr. Chourbagi said in an interview in Slough, a town on the outskirts of London with a large population of refugees from Syria and other conflicts.
By the start of 2014, the opposition felt so strong in its negotiating position that it arrived at United Nations-brokered peace talks in Geneva with a proposal to create an interim government – an offer that made no mention at all of Mr. al-Assad. He and his régime were finished, they believed.
“The régime’s cruelty pushed people. They wanted to defend themselves,” says Mr. Chourbagi, who remains a committed pacifist, despite being arrested and tortured for three months early in the uprising. “When the revolution transformed from pacifism to military – for me that was the beginning of the end.”
Even before the rise of the Islamic State, U.S. President Barack Obama had made clear that his support for the Syrian rebellion had limits. He warned Mr. al-Assad in 2012 not to cross the “red line” of using banned chemical weapons in the war, but did nothing when the régime’s army used sarin gas on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August, 2013. It would be the first of many proved uses of chemical weapons, and the beginning of the end of U.S. influence over the outcome.
Into the vacuum stepped Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in September, 2015, caught the world off-guard by deploying his military to bolster Mr. al-Assad’s régime and protect the Soviet-era naval base in the port of Lattakia. Russian air strikes quickly turned the tide of the war, forcing the anti-Assad rebels to retreat to the corners that they still control today.
The political opposition, once unified around the goal of fighting the régime, began to fall apart. The Islamic State caliphate drew adherents from Sunni Muslim youth who came to see the struggle for Syria in sectarian terms (the al-Assad family are adherents of a strain of Shia Islam, and the régime has been supported throughout the war by fighters from Iran, the region’s main Shia power).
There were also the separate tensions between Turkey, which cheered on the Arab Spring revolts (and the form of political Islam they swept into office in Egypt and Tunisia), and Saudi Arabia, which feared and opposed the democratic tide. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood government elected in 2011 was deposed in a military coup supported by Saudi Arabia. The regional rivalry created a rift inside the Syrian National Council as well, strengthening the Russian narrative that Syria’s only choice was between Mr. al-Assad and anarchy.
Bahia Mardini, a Syrian Kurdish journalist who attended the Geneva peace talks in 2014, says foreign powers played the various Syrian factions “as if we were cards.” But she also blames the opposition, which started fighting amongst itself before they had achieved their shared aim of deposing Mr. al-Assad.
“They were in a hurry to take power,” she said. “They believed change was coming, so they tried to destroy each other.”
But the staged vote will provide a harsh reality check – a reminder of how much ground the rebels have lost since the heady days of 2013 and 2014 when change felt imminent. The process is seen as a signal to Syria’s opposition – and the international community – that Mr. al-Assad and his régime aren’t going anywhere.
“The régime thinks that it can force the result of this election on us, and the international community will start to give up [on Syria],” said Hadi al-Bahra, who served in 2014 as the president of the Syrian National Council, an umbrella group representing a kaleidoscope of rebel groups and pro-democracy forces. Mr. al-Bahra was also a top opposition negotiator through several rounds of failed peace talks with representatives of the régime.
The Syria that Mr. al-Assad presides over is a shattered country. Ten years of war have left more than 500,000 people dead or missing, and the ongoing violence has driven more than 12 million others – more than half the country’s prewar population – from their homes. The economy is a broken mess, needing tens of billions of dollars in investment just to return it to its prewar state, when it was already one of the poorest countries in the region.
It’s also a country that the régime, which is backed by Russia and Iran, can only claim to govern parts of. Russia’s military intervention, which began in 2015, helped save Mr. al-Assad’s forces from defeat and aided their recapture of key cities such as Aleppo, Homs and Daraa. But the east of the country is run by the Kurdish forces allied to the U.S., while the northwest province of Idlib and much of the border zone remain are controlled by rebel groups with Turkish military posts protecting them inside Syrian territory.
“Anybody who can claim victory in Syria should be put into a mental institution,” Mr. al-Bahra said in a telephone interview.
Oussama Chourbagi briefly lived in a free Syria, or a corner of it. In the first three years of the conflict, the activist – who was trained as a pharmacist in France but returned to his country at the outset of the uprising – was part of the local council in Daraya. The Damascus suburb was one of the first areas to escape Mr. al-Assad’s grasp. Unlike other parts of Syria, where the once-peaceful uprising quickly turned to violence as the régime kept shooting at its opponents, Daraya placed its armed groups under civilian control.
“We wanted to create a small example to us and to the international community that we can manage and we can control our area, because the [narrative] of the régime was, ‘if we don’t want Bashar al-Assad, you will have Islamist groups, it will be a mess, you will have chaos.’ I can say that we reached 80 per cent of our goal in Daraya … any decisions taken were taken by the majority,” Mr. Chourbagi said in an interview in Slough, a town on the outskirts of London with a large population of refugees from Syria and other conflicts.
By the start of 2014, the opposition felt so strong in its negotiating position that it arrived at United Nations-brokered peace talks in Geneva with a proposal to create an interim government – an offer that made no mention at all of Mr. al-Assad. He and his régime were finished, they believed.
Mr. al-Bahra, who led the opposition delegation, says all that was lacking was a unified message from the international community telling Mr. al-Assad that it was time to go. But relations between Russia and the West were plunging in early 2014 over a separate crisis in Ukraine. Moscow broke with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s call in Geneva for Mr. al-Assad to resign. Instead, the Kremlin threw its full weight behind the Syrian régime.
“The régime’s cruelty pushed people. They wanted to defend themselves,” says Mr. Chourbagi, who remains a committed pacifist, despite being arrested and tortured for three months early in the uprising. “When the revolution transformed from pacifism to military – for me that was the beginning of the end.”
Even before the rise of the Islamic State, U.S. President Barack Obama had made clear that his support for the Syrian rebellion had limits. He warned Mr. al-Assad in 2012 not to cross the “red line” of using banned chemical weapons in the war, but did nothing when the régime’s army used sarin gas on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August, 2013. It would be the first of many proved uses of chemical weapons, and the beginning of the end of U.S. influence over the outcome.
Into the vacuum stepped Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in September, 2015, caught the world off-guard by deploying his military to bolster Mr. al-Assad’s régime and protect the Soviet-era naval base in the port of Lattakia. Russian air strikes quickly turned the tide of the war, forcing the anti-Assad rebels to retreat to the corners that they still control today.
The political opposition, once unified around the goal of fighting the régime, began to fall apart. The Islamic State caliphate drew adherents from Sunni Muslim youth who came to see the struggle for Syria in sectarian terms (the al-Assad family are adherents of a strain of Shia Islam, and the régime has been supported throughout the war by fighters from Iran, the region’s main Shia power).
There were also the separate tensions between Turkey, which cheered on the Arab Spring revolts (and the form of political Islam they swept into office in Egypt and Tunisia), and Saudi Arabia, which feared and opposed the democratic tide. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood government elected in 2011 was deposed in a military coup supported by Saudi Arabia. The regional rivalry created a rift inside the Syrian National Council as well, strengthening the Russian narrative that Syria’s only choice was between Mr. al-Assad and anarchy.
Bahia Mardini, a Syrian Kurdish journalist who attended the Geneva peace talks in 2014, says foreign powers played the various Syrian factions “as if we were cards.” But she also blames the opposition, which started fighting amongst itself before they had achieved their shared aim of deposing Mr. al-Assad.
“They were in a hurry to take power,” she said. “They believed change was coming, so they tried to destroy each other.”
On Wednesday, or shortly thereafter, Mr. al-Assad will declare a sweeping victory over his two token opponents – Abdullah Salloum Abdullah, a former deputy cabinet minister whose own Socialists Unionists Party supports Mr. al-Assad, and Mahmoud Ahmed Marei, who claims to represent the opposition to Mr. al-Assad but who is derided by those still fighting the régime.
The only real question is whether the level of official support will be allowed to dip slightly, as it did in 2014, when Mr. al-Assad won “just” 92.2 per cent of the votes in what was seen as muted acknowledgement that the régime was in the middle of a war that wasn’t going very well. It was the only time he or his father gained less than 99 per cent.
Mr. al-Assad’s campaign slogan translates awkwardly as “Hope to Work.” Slick social-media accounts show the eye-doctor-turned-dictator, dressed in a blazer and no tie, speaking to a group of construction workers. “Working in war conditions, as well as being an honour and morality, becomes a defence of the homeland,” Mr. al-Assad was quoted as saying. (Mr. al-Assad’s campaign page had slightly more than 1,500 followers on Twitter before it was “temporarily restricted” on Tuesday, and more than 147,000 on Facebook, which had taken no action as of Thursday.)
Another photo shows Mr. al-Assad looking at military maps. In a third, he’s holding a sapling. There’s no mention on any of the accounts regarding if or how he intends to unite his shattered state.
“After all this blood and this revolution and the people refusing the régime – saying we don’t want Assad, we don’t want the mukhabarat [secret police], we want democracy – they should make some changes. But they don’t change anything at all. It’s still about the Baath Party, even though I don’t think even they read the Baath Party texts. They just want authority and power,” Ms. Mardini said.
The only real question is whether the level of official support will be allowed to dip slightly, as it did in 2014, when Mr. al-Assad won “just” 92.2 per cent of the votes in what was seen as muted acknowledgement that the régime was in the middle of a war that wasn’t going very well. It was the only time he or his father gained less than 99 per cent.
Mr. al-Assad’s campaign slogan translates awkwardly as “Hope to Work.” Slick social-media accounts show the eye-doctor-turned-dictator, dressed in a blazer and no tie, speaking to a group of construction workers. “Working in war conditions, as well as being an honour and morality, becomes a defence of the homeland,” Mr. al-Assad was quoted as saying. (Mr. al-Assad’s campaign page had slightly more than 1,500 followers on Twitter before it was “temporarily restricted” on Tuesday, and more than 147,000 on Facebook, which had taken no action as of Thursday.)
Another photo shows Mr. al-Assad looking at military maps. In a third, he’s holding a sapling. There’s no mention on any of the accounts regarding if or how he intends to unite his shattered state.
“After all this blood and this revolution and the people refusing the régime – saying we don’t want Assad, we don’t want the mukhabarat [secret police], we want democracy – they should make some changes. But they don’t change anything at all. It’s still about the Baath Party, even though I don’t think even they read the Baath Party texts. They just want authority and power,” Ms. Mardini said.
Mr. Chourbagi, the pharmacist-turned-activist said he, like most Syrians outside régime-controlled areas of the country, will ignore Wednesday’s election, and the result. Instead, he and the Afaq Academy, the non-governmental organization he founded in 2012, will focus on trying to explain the concept of democracy to Syrians who have no experience with ideas like voting, paying taxes in exchange for receiving services, or equality before the law. Afaq’s focus, for now, is an educational campaign aimed at the 55 per cent of Syrians who now live either in rebel-held areas of the country or in exile.
“The struggle for Syria isn’t between the opposition and the régime. It’s between the people and the culture of dictatorship,” Mr. Chourbagi said. But he acknowledges that the real election he’s trying to prepare for isn’t happening any time soon. “I still have hope, but for the long term.” '
“The struggle for Syria isn’t between the opposition and the régime. It’s between the people and the culture of dictatorship,” Mr. Chourbagi said. But he acknowledges that the real election he’s trying to prepare for isn’t happening any time soon. “I still have hope, but for the long term.” '
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