Tomorrow – after more than half a century – Syrians will go to the polls to cast a vote for the presidency. Allegedly, they will be able to choose freely between three candidates, including the current president, Bashar al-Assad. While there is little doubt that Assad will win, how has the election process been conducted and how have the challenging candidates tried to sway voters?

Yazan al-Saadi  al-Akhbar

Roma, 3 giugno 2014, Nena News – Bashar al-Assad, 48 years old, has been in power for 14 years, succeeding his father, Hafez al-Assad who had firmly ruled Syria since 1970. The choice of Bashar was already preordained once his elder brother Bassil, initially groomed to take power, died in a car accident in 1994.

After a quick amendment to the Syrian constitution due to the fact that he was under the legal age for the position, Assad over time garnered the support of many within the political, military, and security apparatus to limit any opposition to his rule.

The eruption of the Syrian uprising in the early months of 2011 is arguably the biggest challenge the young president has ever faced.

For Assad, the uprising was mainly portrayed as part of a larger conspiracy guided by the country’s enemies to forcefully change its political alliances, and a war against religiously fundamentalist militants that emerged as the uprising transformed into a civil war.

On August 2011, Assad signed decree 101, which amended the General Elections Law, as part of what the regime claimed were reform efforts to placate the early demands expressed during the uprising’s early stages.

So far, more than 150,000 Syrians have died in the ensuing battle between the regime’s forces and members of the armed opposition groups. Added to this, millions of Syrians have either been internally displaced or have become refugees in neighboring countries and elsewhere, and an independent research center estimated that the Syrian economy had lost almost $144 billion.

This is the general context which looms over the June 3 elections for the Syrian presidency.

The rules and conditions of the elections

The law stipulates that all elections are public with secret, direct and equal voting rights, where each Syrian voter over the age of eighteen years has one vote. The law bans army members and policemen in service from participating in the elections, and also provides for the formation of a higher judicial committee based in Damascus, with sub-committees in every Syrian province that would monitor and scrutinize the election process. Like the previous election law, the new one reaffirms that a candidate must be Muslim, married to a Syrian, and both be born from parents who are Syrian by birth.

On March 2014, the Syrian parliament approved the new General Elections Law, incorporating more amendments.

Notably, Article 30 of the law decreed that presidential candidates must have resided continuously in the country for no less than 10 years prior to running, effectively banning historical opposition members who have been in exile. Article 39 states that a presidential candidate must not have been convicted of a disreputable crime, without clarifying what a disreputable crime would be. And finally, Article 85 stipulates that candidates must obtain a written endorsement of at least 35 of the Syrian parliament’s 250 members mainly dominated by the Ba’ath party headed by Assad.

Polling stations throughout the country will only be held in areas under the control of the regime’s military forces, while the Syrian electoral commission banned all Syrians who fled the country via “unofficial crossings” from participating, thereby excluding a large number of votes from refugees in Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and around 20 percent of the refugee population in Lebanon.

In addition, Syrians living in countries that have severed diplomatic ties were excluded from the vote, and several countries directly denied Syrian embassies from holding ballots – such as France, Germany, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Last week, the Syrian Interior Ministry announced that 15 million Syrians domestically and abroad were eligible to vote.

The government also announced that foreign monitors from allied countries – such as India, Venezuela, Russia, and North Korea – will be invited to oversee the election process within Syria.

Farce or Milestone?

The regime and its supporters – countries, citizens, and others – hail the elections as a hallmark of Syrian democracy. Moreover, a large number of Syrians view the elections either as a reaffirmation of their support to the regime, a rebuke of the ineffectiveness and incompetence of the various opposition groups, or a necessary step to end the violence besetting the country.

On the other hand, reactions by members of the external Syrian opposition have been vehemently critical.

For its part, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) and its Western and Gulf backers condemned the election process as a meaningless “farce”.

Speaking to the US-based news radio agency National Public Radio, SNC spokesman Khalid Saleh said, “We boycotted the elections completely. We know that they’re a sham, not real. Everybody is wondering whether Assad is going to win by 99.8 or 99.9 percent.”

Likewise, the other main opposition group, the National Coordinating Body (NCB),was opposed to the elections as part and parcel of the regime’s attempt to ensure legitimacy and not democracy, particularly when much of the country is fraught with conflict, but also emphasized that the elections would torpedo the principle agreements in Geneva that sought a political solution to the conflict and ultimately the establishment of a transitional, nation-unity government.

In between the two oppositional giants, Syrians opposed to the elections have expressed their criticisms in numerous creative, satirical ways. Examples include establishing a mock campaign calling for Syrians to vote for Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani to Kafranabel’s “Blood Elections” posters.

Ultimately when the election stations were opened up for Syrians abroad, the turnout was predominately large, according to comments made by Syrian reconciliation minister, Ali Haidar.

“The president of the Foreign Ministry’s central electoral committee said that voting took place in 43 embassies of the Syrian Arab Republic, and the participation rate by registered voters had exceeded 95 percent,” Syrian state media also said, referring to the more than 200,000 Syrian abroad that have registered in Syrian embassies.

While much has been inked on the election process in general, few have sufficiently examined what the challengers offered as a competing platform for Syrians who have chosen to vote.

There are two opponents that were accepted by the judiciary to run against Assad, both of whom were relatively unknown throughout Syria until recently.

Hassan al-Nouri: The free-market enthusiast and Assad admirer

Hassan Abdullah al-Nouri, 54, comes from an affluent Damascene family. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Damascus University in 1982, an MBA from the University of Wisconsin, and a PhD in general management from the Californian-based John F. Kennedy University in 1989.

He was a member of parliament from 1998 to 2003, and served as secretary of Damascus Chamber of Industry from 1997 to 2000, and briefly appointed as minister of state for Administrative Development Affairs from 2000 to 2002.

He currently heads the National Initiative for Administration and Change in Syria, which was formed by the regime under the pretext of fighting corruption and nurture administrative reform and human development.

Nouri is known to have strong ties with the Syrian business community, and stated that he is able to fund his entire election campaign by himself. His election campaign is based on the pretext that he represents Syria’s “silent majority,” but has not seemed to have clarified in public the details of his political policies if he were to be elected.

What he has done, however, in various interviews, was to express his support of Assad’s political policies and handling of the uprising.

In particular, during a nearly two-hour interview with a local Syrian news channel, Nouri routinely praised Assad and his father, and even went so far as to say that winning the elections was not a priority for him

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-hrPyZryLI

“I do believe that President Assad leading his political file was a very strong leader,” al-Nouri had said in another recent interview, this time with AP. “When you find a leader like him, fighting this kind of war and this unbelievable terrorism, terrorist action in every place in our country, you have to respect what he’s doing.”

“But I can tell President Assad, ‘Yes you did very well in the political file,’ but I think his people, the economists in his government, were not doing well the last 10 years,” he added.

Of his economic policies, Nouri noted that he was adamant about pushing forward a free-market economy as a means to deal with the poverty and economic problems effecting the country.

Maher Hajjar: A communist alternative?

Like Nouri, Maher Abdul-Hafiz Hajjar is equally supportive of Assad’s political handling of the uprising, but has been more articulate about the nature of his election platform, at least in rhetoric.

Hajjar was born in Aleppo in 1968, and holds a bachelor’s degree in linguistic studies from Aleppo University. He joined the Syrian Communist Party in 1984, withdrawing in 2000 and forming a temporary leadership for Aleppo’s communists. By 2003, he joined the National Committee for the Unity of Syrian Communists which was led by Qadri Jamil, one of the few internal opposition groups approved by the government.

Hajjar had an unsuccessful run for parliament in 2007, and ran again in 2012 and won with apparently the second largest number of votes granted to independent candidates.

He was the first to submit an application to run for the presidency a day after the Syrian Supreme Constitutional Court said that it was ready to receive candidacy applications.

Speaking to the Syrian news agency, Hajjar argued that “the only solution [for the conflict] can be through getting the Syrian people united against terrorism and the launch of a large-scale political process among the Syrians themselves.”

In order to do this, Hajjar claimed that if elected he would root out corruption and seek “a general amnesty that turns the page of the last three years and strike with an iron fist anyone who dares [infringe] on the state’s sovereignty where we live in a country without blood, destruction or sabotage.”

Channeling his communist background, Hajjar argued that the solution to Syria’s economic problems would be an “increasing of salaries at the expense of profits and re-distribute the wealth, resolve the problem of unemployment and housing through gigantic investment projects.”

In terms of international relations, Hajjar stated that his platform “concentrates on seeking strongest relations with states that respect the international law and human values, and with national and social liberation movements” and would attempt a “full boycott with the Zionist-Imperialist project in the region and complete boycott with the Arab reactionary regimes.”

More of Hajjar’s platform can be seen in the following two hour and a half interview on a Syrian news channel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUFa-8c26pc

In the end, Assad has the most visibility, with major backing by the political, military, security, and economic apparatuses. The fact that internal conflict continues to rage unabated suggests that a change in leadership is highly unlikely, not to mention that much of the structures of the regime rely on Assad’s endurance. Indeed, Assad does not have to put in much effort to campaign since he is already omnipresent, and has complete political, economic, and social dominance.

By any standard, the presidential elections in Syria are problematic especially as they are being held in a time of war, exclude a large portion of the population, with the results being predetermined. It is less so a real act of self-determination for and by the populace and more akin to political theater, in which all the players are merely caricatures in a grim and absurd drama.

On Wednesday, it will probably be business as usual. Nena News