A few days before the new Syrian People’s Assembly was convened, I kept passing by its building in the center of Damascus. The trees around it were redecorated, the entrance was cleaned, the facade was well lit at night. It looked neat. It also looked empty. The building is located on the corner of Salhiyya, a commercial district in one of the most residential areas of the city. For six decades under the Baath Party, Syrians passed by without looking back. There was nothing to look at inside. Now, it was being improved in anticipation of a parliament that many Syrians complained had taken too long to arrive.
On July 12, it finally met. The roads around it were jammed for hours; the security presence was heavy; and the members were sworn together, in one group. The head of the highest election committee explained that this would save time and preserve the security of the session. It was rare to officially acknowledge how fragile the situation in Syria remains.
Then the members started arguing about how to vote. Should candidates who lost one position be allowed to run for another? Should members vote by raising their hands, or should dissenters stand instead?
The acting speaker, the oldest member in the room, finally lost patience. “Please,” he said, “everybody wants to lecture me about order and rules. We don’t have rules and regulations. This is a brand new thing.”
A few moments that captured the day better. Syria does not restore parliament. It revives parliamentary politics almost from the beginning, after more than six decades where the institution existed mainly to approve what the president had already decided.
The new Syrian parliament is neither a democratic parliament nor a rubber stamp. It is an attempt at a controlled political opening, a parliament designed to help a strong presidency manage a fragile transition without turning into an adversary.
But this does not mean that it is doomed to be irrelevant. If the Syrian president is strategic, his lawmakers courageous, his citizens insistent, and his international friends supportive, the People’s Assembly can become a meaningful powerhouse in its own right. Controlled openings do not always escape their architects. But they develop their own politics, and Syria already has.
Many will be tempted for remove The Syrian Parliament like meaningless. They will have good reason. Start with how the meeting was structured. A third of its 210 members, 70 in total, were appointed directly by President Ahmed al-Sharaa. Others were elected indirectly, through electoral colleges created by a higher electoral committee that Sharaa himself appointed. There was no popular vote. Candidates were told that they can only run as individuals, not as parties or lists.
The result is a parliament that has a weak relationship with the people it is supposed to represent. Many members had never run anything resembling a campaign. They did not knock on doors or stand in front of a crowd of people and ask for votes. Many only began to introduce themselves to the public after they had already won, posting on social media about who they were. Over the past month, I kept asking Syrians to name one member of parliament, any member. Many could not name a single one.
The institution is not even known who is in it. None of the members had served in the actual parliament before. Syria has not had one in over six decades. They are still discovering what power they have, what it is declaration of the constitution it allows them to do, and what it doesn’t. That was seen in the first session of the first session, where the members argued about the basic questions of how the parliament conducts itself.
That statement doesn’t give them much to work with. Article 30 allows the parliament to propose and pass laws, amend or repeal the main law, ratify contracts, approve the budget, and hold meetings with ministers. That’s where the list ends. There is no vote of confidence in the government and no real tools to force the executive to do anything. The ears let the ministers explain themselves, but they don’t let the parliament hold them accountable.
Representation has its flaws. Three seats in Suwayda, a southern province with a large Druze population, remain vacant. Sharaa is more preferred wait until the entire area of Syria is stabilized before those seats were filled, and unfortunately, the first session fell almost a year after collisions south of Syria began. Some Kurdish parties, for their part, rejected how the representatives of the Kurdish regions were elected, protesting that the seats reserved for the Kurds were too few. If the numbers confirm the claims, the comments themselves cast doubt on the parliament’s ability to speak for the country.
The first episode confirmed this picture. Members selected like the speaker Abdul Hamid al-Awak, a judge who helped write the declaration of the constitution itself and who seems to be close to the presidency. In his acceptance speech, Awak emphasized teamwork and addressed the executive branch directly. We will cooperate with you, he told them, and we will enforce the law to the best of our ability.
The word “management” didn’t come up all day. Even the head of the election committee, opening the session, explained that the parliament will focus on the construction of stone and people and enacting laws. Government surveillance was not on his list.
So give the skeptics their due: This is a weak parliament—by design—that is closely tied to the presidency and only marginally representative.
Weak, however, is not the same as useless. Even before the first session, the delegates were to compete on the speaker. Union began to form—some regional, built around Aleppo, Damascus, and the eastern provinces, and some ideological, among members close to the presidency, Islamists, and others who appear to be liberals. Three candidates ran for the speakership. Awak won with 99 out of 205 votes, against 75 for Mouayad al-Qablawi and 31 for the third candidate. Those following the polls in Damascus are still debating which presidential candidate he actually wanted. Either answer makes the same point: In a chamber where one-third of the members owe their seats directly to the president, the House’s preference, whatever it was, did not determine the outcome.
Something changed the day the members were sworn in. Another center of power now exists in Syria. It’s weak, but it’s there. Under Bashar al-Assad, Syrians derisively called parliament a claptrap.
That’s why two small details of Sunday’s episode stayed with me. The first is that the entire day was broadcast live on state television—controversy, confusion, contested votes, and all. Under the previous regime, the parliament appeared on state television to give one voice. On Sunday, Syrians watched their members disintegrate in real time. The second is that when Sharaa spoke, no one clapped. The members praised their own vote, their new speaker, their procedures. To the president, silence. Maybe they were directed. However, one understood that the legitimacy in this room should look different now, and that itself is new.
On paper, the design of the room tells one story, while its early character tells another. Only 22 members are women, and 15 of them were nominated rather than elected, a number that drew criticism the day the lists came out.
Then came the race for two positions of deputy speaker. Ten members ran, and four were women, announcing their candidates from the floor. Madonna Bishara won the second deputy seat and spoke later about her interest in rights and women’s issues. The women hold the 10th place in the council but made up almost half of the field for the leadership position.
The coming weeks and the months will provide a series of indicators that suggest how much of a real political role the Syrian parliament can play. To begin with, the meeting has one month to write its rules, and if it copies what was handed down or argues in its own way of something alone it will say a lot about its character.
Article 30 allows the body to summon ministers and question them. If months pass and no minister sits before the committee, or ministers only come to present and thank, then the cooperation that Awak promised will be the whole story. If the case ends with the minister changing course, something new will have happened in Syrian politics.
Another thing to look at is what members are doing in their districts. Most of them never campaigned and did not develop the habit of responding to the people who hold their positions. Balancing the representation of local and national governments is one of the things that this country is learning anew from the beginning, and members who are based in their states will be building a source of legitimacy that does not depend on the presidency.
Then there is the issue of parties. There are no political parties in parliament right now, and talk of a new co-working speaker suggests that party law is not coming anytime soon. But this may not be as important as people think. Blues formed around the speaker will continue to form. The only question is whether Syria hosts the tournament publicly or pretends for a few more years that it doesn’t exist.
Finally, see what happens when the 30-month parliamentary term ends. The constitutional declaration states that the term of parliament can be extended, but not by whom, or how, or if the president appoints another third of the body again. How this controversy is resolved. Everyone in the council knows that the end announced by the transition is a permanent constitution and elected parliaments under it, even if no one knows when this will happen. A member who builds a real base in his district blocks every version of Syria’s future. A member who relies on an update from above bets on only one. What bets they make will shape the institution more than any article in the declaration.
The rest of the world can play an important role in making the Syrian parliament more important. Governments, parliaments, and organizations dealing with Syria should participate in this meeting as an institution, and not pass everything in the presidential palace. Invite his committees, train his staff, answer his questions. Dating will not make you free. But treating it as an appendage of the executive ensures that it remains one, and Syria’s transition requires many centers of power, not a few.
What would success look like? It is not a parliament to topple ministers or stop the president. That reads wrong then. The true best case is quiet. Within a month, the parliament writes bylaws that are truly its own. Its committees begin to summon ministers, and its meetings gradually turn from politeness to investigation. Members find that the budget, which only they can approve, is beneficial. Groups created around speakers turn into something like proto-parties, obviously, rather than WhatsApp groups. Members spend their weeks in their districts and return to Damascus carrying demands, and people who could not name a single member of parliament start calling when electricity bills rise, the lines get longer in the gas stationsor government the price of wheat it reduces their yield.
None of that would make Syria a democracy. It would make parliament a practice, a speech where powers are contested, not just announced.
At the end of the first session, the newly elected secretary of the council stood up to speak. “History will not record who won today,” he told members. “It will record how this session was managed, how the Syrians gathered again under the dome of the parliament. The parliaments that will come after us will follow our steps. If we are weak, they will be weak. If we are strong, they will be strong.”
It was the truest thing said in that room all day.
