DAMASCUS—In 1988, a Druze academic named Adham Masoud al-Qaq tried to run for Syria’s parliament, the People’s Assembly. Hafez al-Assad was dictator of Syria at the time and Qaq made the mistake of pushing for democratic reforms. He was arrested for his opposition to the regime—his third time that decade—and then imprisoned. Upon release, he fled to Egypt, where he lived in exile for 36 years.
When the Assad regime collapsed on Dec.8, 2024, Qaq returned to Syria in triumph, like so many of the regime’s detractors. Less than a year after that, he was back in Syrian politics. On Oct. 5, Syria held its first parliamentary elections since Ahmed al-Sharaa took power, and Qaq was nominated to be a delegate in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana.
DAMASCUS—In 1988, a Druze academic named Adham Masoud al-Qaq tried to run for Syria’s parliament, the People’s Assembly. Hafez al-Assad was dictator of Syria at the time and Qaq made the mistake of pushing for democratic reforms. He was arrested for his opposition to the regime—his third time that decade—and then imprisoned. Upon release, he fled to Egypt, where he lived in exile for 36 years.
When the Assad regime collapsed on Dec.8, 2024, Qaq returned to Syria in triumph, like so many of the regime’s detractors. Less than a year after that, he was back in Syrian politics. On Oct. 5, Syria held its first parliamentary elections since Ahmed al-Sharaa took power, and Qaq was nominated to be a delegate in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana.
Under Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded him, Syria’s parliament functioned as a largely symbolic institution. It served to legitimize government policy and sometimes offered input on its formulation. But it had no authority to obstruct executive power. Many fear that Sharaa’s government, while ostensibly transitional, is continuing that authoritarian tradition.
Only a few thousand Syrians took part in this recent election, through a tiered electoral college system, to fill seats in a body that will have very limited power to challenge Sharaa’s authority. The government argued in a June statement that Syria cannot hold traditional elections “given the presence of millions of internally and externally displaced persons, the absence of official documents [and] the fragility of the legal structure.”
In an interview with Foreign PolicyQaq said he did not face direct threats in this latest election. “However,” he added, “we could clearly sense that this or that person would win as a representative before the voting even took place.”
In March, Sharaa issue is constitutional declaration establishing a five-year transitional period. It was under this framework that the “elections” were held. While the declaration grants the assembly legislative powers, these appear limited to acting on bills initiated by the executive. The assembly will also have no power to trigger elections through a vote of no-confidence. (As for presidential elections, Sharaa has said they could take four to five years.)
“You can’t really call these elections,” said Radwan Ziadeh, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. “It was more the formation of Syrian legislative power.” Nonetheless, those who were afforded the opportunity to join this power structure demonstrated incredible enthusiasm on the campaign trail.
Across several candidate meetings and election events that Foreign Policy attended, a consistent pattern of constructive debate and civic engagement emerged—faint but genuine stirrings of liberal process in a country long deprived of it.
Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa visits a poling station in Damascus on Oct. 5. Louai Beshara/AFP via Getty Images
In June, Sharaa appointed an 11-member Higher Election Committee, which oversaw the creation of electoral subcommittees across the country. In this way, the Syrian president created a cascading appointment system, with him at the top. The subcommittees selected a pool of delegates for each governorate, and the delegates voted among themselves to fill seats in parliament. Approximately 6,000 delegates were chosen, and they voted to fill 119 of the 210 seats. Elections for several constituencies were postponed indefinitely, due to security concerns and tensions between local authorities and Damascus.
Seventy seats—one third of the total—were supposed to be directly appointed by Sharaa by the end of October. But he still hasn’t made his selections, perhaps because he’s been preoccupied with a string of high-profile diplomatic visits abroad. On Oct.15, Sharaa met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow At the end of October, he was in Riyadh for an investment conference.
And on Nov. 10, Sharaa will meet with Trump at the White House, making him the first Syrian president to do so since Syria gained its independence from France in 1946.
In September, Qaq was signing his candidacy paperwork at an administrative office when two men came by to submit one of their wives as a candidate. They were too late. “From this neighborhood, there are 20 people in the electoral committee, only they are allowed to run, and the candidates have already been chosen,” Basem Hamzeh, a member of the rural Damascus subcommittee, told the two confused men. He said the announcements had been “all over” social media.
Adham Masoud al-Qaq, a candidate for the Syrian parliament in rural Damascus, signs his candidacy paperwork at an administrative office on Sept. 27.Fin de Pencier for Foreign Policy
The interaction underscored the opaque nature of these elections, with a process only nominally open to the public. Subcommittees retained full authority over the final selections, making the system effectively closed and susceptible to corruption. And despite Hamzeh’s claim that there had been a broad public awareness campaign, many Syrians say they didn’t even realize an election was taking place.
The subcommittees were supposed to follow what officials described as representation targets—not formal legal quotas, but guidelines regarded as binding in practice. These guidelines called for at least 20 percent of electoral college members to be women, with roughly 70 percent drawn from professional or technocratic backgrounds and 30 percent made up of “traditional community notables.”
Of the 119 seats that were voted for on Oct. 6, only six were won by women and only 10 by minority candidates, including Kurds, Christians, and Alawites. The vast majority of seats went to Sunni men drawn from the administrative and business elite.
A candidate for the Syrian parliament in rural Damascus addresses other candidates at an election committee meeting on Oct. 2nd. Fin de Pencier photo for Foreign Policy
Mouyad Zaidan, a professor of law at Damascus State University, was on the ballot in Damascus. On Sept. 27, he sat down for an interview. One week prior, he had been robbed and kidnapped after trying to buy a car on Facebook marketplace in Aleppo. His hands still bore the red marks from where he was bound. Zaidan implied that the criminals were remnants of the Assad regime.
“His loyalists are still present in society,” Zaidan said. “The same criminals who committed atrocities are now scattered among us, engaging in theft, fraud, kidnapping, and murder.”
Zaidan is a Sunni Muslim, part of Syria’s demographic majority. For the first time in decades, Sunnis dominate the political order in Damascus. But it remains unclear to what extent political Islam will influence state policy.
“In the coming stage, God willing, society will adopt a free-market economy compatible with Islamic law—one that avoids the socialism of the previous era,” Zaidan said.
On Sept. 30, delegates in the city of Homs gathered for a meeting to present their political platforms to one another. A woman named Maysoun Shams al-Din took to the stage and presented an impressive resume—a master’s degree in literature and decades of experience as an auditor and management consultant.
FP approached Din for an interview after her presentation. But an election official intervened, arguing that the government’s press accreditation “says you’re allowed to interview people, not candidates.” Press freedom, just like democracy itself, is a work in progress in Syria.
During that event, and another in the Damascus suburb of Douma on Oct. 2nd at which Qaq appeared, the focus was on reconstruction and the economy. Douma is one of several Damascus suburbs that was decimated by Russian and Syrian airstrikes in the first few years of the Syrian civil war and has remained in ruin ever since. The conference hall where the meeting was held that day was one of the few buildings on the block unscathed by war.
When Qaq took to the stage, he dedicated most of his speech to the philosophy of statecraft. “The Prophet did not build a religious state; he built a civil one, which he called ‘al-Madinah al-Munawwarah’—the enlightened city. A city-state built to face the divisions of tribes, clans, and minorities. We can learn much from that great example,” he said.
Qaq did not win his seat. Neither did Zaidan. But both were grateful to have participated. The delegates that the subcommittees selected seemed to be, by and large, accomplished and locally respected. In meeting after meeting, delegates embraced the process with surprising zeal—aware it may be a facade but eager to take part in something that resembled politics.
“I had a chance to succeed, had it not been for some neighborhoods in Damascus banding together to support a list they backed. But we met with them, and they are, God willing, worthy of representing Damascus. We ask Allah for everyone’s success and prosperity,” Zaidan said.
