Farce at the polls in Syria

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad cast his vote Wednesday in the Duma, east of Damascus.Hassan Ammar / AP

President Bashar al-Assad won the elections for his third term seven years ago with 89% of the vote while losing the war. With the opposition in exile and the insurgency cornered in its stronghold in Idlib, Assad has now once again organized a farce plebiscite to try to legitimize the military victory at the polls after a decade of civil strife. Russian intervention and the deployment of pro-Iranian forces saved him from defeat six years ago and keep him, under guardianship, at the helm of a devastated country, of which he only controls two-thirds and with half of its 22 million inhabitants uprooted.

What remains of a disbanded opposition has branded the elections a "consolidation of tyranny" and a "murder of the political process" sponsored by the United Nations to end the conflict. With the holding of the elections, Assad sends the signal to the world that it controls Syria and that it continues to be the only interlocutor for reconstruction in a post-war period that never comes. Before two other irrelevant candidates, empowered by the regime itself to give the appearance of competition, the president has staged his challenge to the international community by casting his vote in the suburb of Duma, the last rebel fiefdom in Damascus, as a symbol of his triumph in the battlefield. Faced with the condemnation of the US and several European countries to some presidential "not credible and illegitimate",Assad has scornfully retorted that "the validity of those views equals zero."

In the midst of food shortages, the brutal devaluation of the Syrian pound against the dollar or the shortage of fuel in a country with oil deposits (now in the hands of the Kurdish militias allied to the US), the government blames the misery from his people to international sanctions, starting with those of Washington and Brussels. But Assad still does not admit that it is precisely its blockade of the UN-sponsored process of dialogue and reconciliation with the opposition that triggers the economic punishment.

Resolution 2254 of the UN Security Council prescribed, already in 2015, that the elections have to be called and supervised by the international community, after a negotiation between the Government and the opposition, to guarantee the participation of more than five million refugees and exiles and six million internally displaced persons without assigned electoral college, or of the millions of Syrians encircled in Idlib or isolated in the territories under Kurdish control. Without the endorsement of the United Nations, the presidential elections in which Assad has tried to legitimize and establish himself are just a sham organized by a family clan that has governed the destinies of Syria for more than half a century and has not hesitated to bomb their own. people to stay in power.