Syria chooses a Parliament of revolutionaries

By Carlotta Gall

DAMASCUS — The public was not allowed to vote. Women and minorities fared poorly.

But Syria’s first elections since the Assad dictatorship was ousted 10 months ago still generated excitement in the country, where some saw it as another step toward shaking off decades of authoritarian rule.

In voting that began Sunday (5), local councils are choosing 140 of 210 parliament members with another 70 to be appointed by President Ahmad al-Sharaa in the next two weeks. Not surprisingly, results announced Monday (6) heavily favoured men from the country’s Sunni Muslim majority who had fought in the yearslong revolution against President Bashar Assad.

Women and members of Syria’s diverse religious and ethnic minorities won few seats.

That did not dampen the enthusiasm of some Syrians, who welcomed the rise of revolutionaries and the fall of the old regime after a brutal civil war that lasted nearly 14 years.

“There is no way they are going to choose someone who was not standing on the front line,” said Mona Abu Athan, a female candidate from the capital, Damascus.

Electoral officials released partial results Monday for 119 of the 140 seats in the People’s Assembly slated to be chosen by the local councils. Another 21 seats were left open for parts of Syria excluded from the initial voting because they are not yet under government control.

Dr Nawar Najma, spokesperson for the electoral committee, said at a news conference announcing the results that officials hope to hold voting in those areas when possible.

Some Syrians, absorbed with daily hardships, said they were unaware of the election or who was running. But in political and activist circles, the formation of a new parliament and greater freedoms of speech have awakened a new level of debate and active jostling for political representation in post-Assad Syria.

Of the 119 seats announced, only six went to women and less than a dozen to religious and ethnic minorities.

The results were partly a reflection of the conservative society. But they also indicated the electoral system was set up to favour the Sunni majority and was not designed to ensure fairer and broader representation, said Nabieh Nabhan, a political activist in the coastal city of Tartus.

For some, the election results added to concerns that Syria is entering an era dominated by Sunni nationalism.

The public didn’t vote directly because the government said Syria still faces significant administrative challenges. Many people, for example, do not have identification and are displaced.

Al-Sharaa’s government set up an electoral committee to run the process. The committee appointed regional bodies that chose members of local electoral councils; the local councils chose the lawmakers.

Among the winning candidates is a much-loved doctor who ran a frontline hospital during the civil war in the northwestern province of Idlib. A female author who wrote powerful novels about the war also won a seat.

A number of the successful candidates were people displaced during the civil war to northwestern Syria. They lived in or nearby to the area under al-Shara’s rebel administration in Idlib province.

Athan, the candidate from Damascus, who did not win a seat, said female candidates had failed to strategize as successfully as many of the men did and could not agree on supporting a small number of consensus candidates.

“We are so new to the experience and the men were organized,” she said.

Only one Christian was elected. Although minority Christians live mainly in the large cities of Damascus and Aleppo and the province of Hama, none were elected there.

The Kurdish-led region of northeastern Syria and the province of Sweida in the south, dominated by the Druze minority, were excluded from voting because those regions are not under government control.

Al-Shara is expected to even out some of the imbalances in the representation of women and minorities when he appoints 70 more lawmakers in the coming days, election officials said. Whether he does this will be a test of his commitment to make good on his promises of representative government.

The representation of minorities has become an issue of international concern after criticism of the government’s handling of several waves of deadly sectarian violence since it came to power.

Nevertheless, political activists welcomed the parliamentary voting, expecting this legislature to be an improvement after decades when the parliament was seen as a rubber stamp for the Assad regime.

Al-Shara’s government has barred all activity by Assad-era political parties, as well as opposition parties that had worked in exile during the civil war.

Candidates were only allowed to run as individuals. As the vote counts came in, political analysts pored over the results to discern the winners’ political leanings.

Abdullah al-Hafi, director of a governance advocacy group known as the Local Administration Councils Unit, said the new parliament “mirrors the broader Syrian reality,” and no single bloc is dominant.

“People are beginning to understand the mechanics of politics and party alliances,” he said. “Many areas that were once outside Assad’s control have shown that their communities now know how to play the political game.”

-New York Times