Rubber-stamp revival
Syria’s new parliament might be more of the same

The head of the Higher Election Committee, Mohammed Taha al-Ahmad, was frank when he told a public gathering in Daraa in late-June that he wanted “a parliament that is homogeneous with the authorities.” Although he later modified this phrase under pressure from those present, the statement clearly expressed what is desired of Syria’s next parliament. Officially, the new People’s Assembly will fill an institutional vacuum and will lend legitimacy and credibility to Syria’s transition. The details of the electoral process, however, do not chime with the second of these objectives.

Elections in theory
The Victory Statement of 29 December 2024 accorded the President the authority to form a “temporary legislative council for the transitional phase” (Article 9). The Constitutional Declaration of 13 March 2025 (Article 24), however, complicated the process by establishing a formula that combines appointment and election: the president directly appoints one-third of the members, while the other two-thirds are elected through a narrowly defined electoral college. This hybrid approach, which was the result of pressure from members of the committee that drafted the Constitutional Declaration, was passed without serious discussion of its practical consequences.

The first of these is a legitimacy gap. One-third of the seats – about seventy members out of 210 – will be appointed directly by the president, giving him an almost absolute grip on the parliament’s decisions. Secondly is the weakness of the mechanism for forming the electoral colleges that will choose the remaining two-thirds. Each parliamentary seat will be decided by just thirty to fifty electors, a number so small as to be incapable of representing the diverse society within any electoral district.

Thirdly, the electoral colleges will not be elected directly by the people. Equally, Syria suffers political instability, territorial  division, a threat of terrorism, wide internal displacement, massive external migration and outdated civil registers. In reality, it would be impossible to conduct meaningful elections, even for electoral colleges.

Even if genuine representation could be attained – a very long shot by any measure – the Constitutional Declaration deprives Syria’s new parliament of key tools of oversight and legislation. Instead of having the right to question ministers or withdraw confidence from them, parliament can only “hold hearings for ministers” (Article 30-1). The declaration also failed to grant the People’s Assembly any right to propose amendments to the Constitutional Declaration. Under Article 50, only the president can do this. Likewise, the Declaration failed to grant parliament the authority to object to any laws issued by the president that conflict with the constitution. Another deficiency is that the president can only be compelled to issue a law that he previously vetoed if two-thirds of members vote for it. This proportion will be practically impossible to achieve given that the mechanisms for parliament’s establishment will give the president and HTS, through their various arms, control over most of the members, either directly or indirectly.

Elections in practice
Presidential Decree No. 66, issued on 2 June 2025, established the 11-person Higher Election Committee, tasked with overseeing the electoral college process that will select two-thirds of new MPs. But the committee is chaired not by an independent figure, but by someone who previously served two terms as a minister in Idlib’s Salvation Government, then as a minister in the transitional government after the fall of Assad, and finally as Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab Affairs. Another member is Mohammad Yasser Kahala, a member of HTS who manages the General Secretariat for Political Affairs, under which fall all the subsidiary directorates in the provinces, in effect constituting an unofficial HTS political party.

The committee does nevertheless include a diverse spectrum of figures, offering a glimmer of hope that it might carry out its duties without total HTS control. Consultative sessions of the Committee in the provinces indicated strongly that revolutionary elites and the educated class in Syria vehemently opposed any re-establishment of an Assad-like People’s Assembly. In general, the interaction of the committee members with “the street” was positive and gave hope that a suitable electoral process might still be possible despite the country’s exceptional circumstances. The Committee did, in fact, respond to many of the demands voiced in its consultative sessions, even proposing an increase in the number of parliamentary  seats from 150, as set out in Article 3 of an initial  presidential decree (No 66). In a second decree (No 143), the president raised the total to 210. Syria was then divided into 60 electoral districts.

The provisional law for the parliamentary elections (Decree 143) was issued on 19 August. The striking feature of this law was that electoral campaigning was restricted to within the electoral college itself (Article 28). This meant that prospective candidates could not canvas in public, instead limiting their activity to WhatsApp and closed-door meetings. This restriction lent the process added opacity, tinged with a whiff of elitism.

Sprint to the finish line
The vast discrepancy between the several months afforded to the Higher Election Committee to commence its work, and the few days allocated to the district subcommittees to choose the electoral colleges, is a major concern. The subcommittees were formed on 2 September and had to select around 5,000 people in the 60 districts representing all sectors and tendencies of Syrian society.

The provisional electoral law was apparently produced in haste. Article 3 states that one of the tasks of the subcommittees was to “choose the members of the electoral college at the level of its district.” The subcommittees thus began their work on the basis that they would themselves select the members of the electoral body. Later, and quite suddenly, however, it was announced that nominations would be accepted directly from citizens wishing to become members of the electoral college. Paragraph 3 of the same article, however, lacked detail on how the identity and credibility of nominees should be ascertained. Later, on 6 September, the Higher Election Committee issued a circular explaining the revised mechanism and giving the subcommittees only six days to submit and examine the thousands of applications received.

An 11 September deadline was set for nominations, while the subcommittees were required to send their preliminary lists to the Higher Election Committee’s central committee the very next day. A subcommittee in Damascus, for example, had just 24 hours to select 500 members of the electoral college from among hundreds of nominations – the same time available to the central committee to study and approve 5,000 nominations from all the subcommittees across Syria. This time pressure made it impossible to study nominee applications or even to establish a logical matrix for selecting members of the electoral colleges from among the candidates in each province.

A further complication is that three additional authorities in each province have the power to weigh in on the names finally approved in the electoral colleges: the governor (appointed by the president), the political director (appointed by the foreign minister), and the provincial security official (appointed by the interior minister.) In recent months these have sought information about persons likely to be included in the electoral colleges, and have even contacted some individuals directly to ask them to join the new People’s Assembly.

The picture as to the credibility of the electoral process may not become clear until 18 September, when the final lists of electoral college members are due to be announced. By the end of the month, when the election is expected to be held, the situation should be fully clarified.