Assad’s Win Is Assured, but Limits Are Exposed
BEIRUT, Lebanon — As Syrians went to the polls on Tuesday in an election virtually certain to give President Bashar al-Assad a new term, buses ferried government workers from their offices to cast ballots. Security checkpoints blocked some people from leaving neighborhoods if they did not have inked fingers proving they had taken part. And a few citizens pronounced themselves so enthusiastic that they had voted several times.
The ballot, which government opponents label a “blood election,” is Syria’s first to feature more than one candidate since Mr. Assad’s father rose to power in 1970. But it is taking place in a divided and ruined landscape, with no balloting in insurgent-held areas and, in government-held areas, with voters hustled to polls under watchful eyes.
Mr. Assad has made clear that he will see victory as a validation of his rule and of his crackdown on the three-year insurgency. He is also sending a message that he is confident of winning the war and is unlikely to exit soon, embarrassing the United States and other international powers that have called for his ouster and sought to broker a substantive political transition.
Still, there were limits to Mr. Assad’s ability to stage-manage the election, which showed how far he remains from knitting the country together. Just blocks from central Damascus neighborhoods festooned with posters of the president, where joy-riding young people waved government flags from cars and polling stations seemed to occupy every school and government building, the long-restive outlying districts and suburbs amounted to another world.
Among the bombed-out apartment blocks of the northern districts of Barzeh and Qaboun, there were no official flags, no cheering crowds and no elections. Grocers sipping tea had switched off the triumphal election coverage on state channels, listening instead to the continued shelling of insurgent-held areas nearby.
Mazen, 40, a fighter in Qaboun, summed it up this way: “Bashar al-Assad is not our president.”
The government has cited recent truces in Barzeh and other areas that were long blockaded and starved by security forces as signs of healing and rebuilding in the country.
The State of U.S. Strategy in Syria
After a presidential election on Tuesday and continued diplomatic maneuvering, the United States’ approach in the three-year crisis.
But even after spending considerable political capital negotiating truces with insurgents in a half-dozen towns ringing the capital — angering some core government supporters — officials appeared to have been unable to persuade fighters in those areas to allow voting.
Many voters, though, expressed enthusiasm for Mr. Assad, and declared the elections a victory over an insurgency they saw as driven by a foreign conspiracy. Razan Mohammad, 35, an employee of Syriatel, the cellphone company owned by the president’s powerful cousin Rami Makhlouf, called Mr. Assad “the only guarantee for Syria to hold together” against what she called extremist Islamist fighters backed by Israel and the West.
“All the barking dogs are outside of Syria, watching our joy and happiness,” she said. “Bashar is the best and the strongest.”
Abu Ali, 55, interviewed in downtown Damascus, was walking with his 12-year-old son from one polling place to another. “I voted five times,” he said. “Even my son voted.”
Streets and shops were closed and security was tight. Government warplanes whooshed over the city.
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A day earlier, some insurgent groups declared that anyone not staying home would be a target. But on Tuesday, major groups, including the Islamic Front and the Army of Islam, said in a statement that they would hold their fire to avoid making things “worse for our people” who were being “led to the election by force.” Still, by day’s end, several dozen mortar rounds had landed in the city, and a shell killed at least one person in the suburb of Jaramana.
Yet even in government-held areas, some opposition activists took risks to mount stealthy protests. In the central city of Hama, members of the Union of Free Students on Monday poured red dye in the Orontes River near the city’s famed wooden water wheels, briefly turning the water blood-red. The elections came three years to the day after security forces fired on a large, peaceful protest in the city, killing dozens.
Mr. Assad’s opponents are little-known, carefully vetted figures. One, Hassan al-Nuri, is a former government minister who made a fortune selling shoe brushes and says he disagrees with Mr. Assad on the economy and corruption but supports his prosecution of the war. The other is Maher al-Hajjar, a member of the tolerated Communist Party who has posted pictures of himself next to Mr. Assad’s portrait; a joke went around that he had voted for the incumbent. Journalists were hard-pressed to find a single voter who had not done so.
Mr. Assad’s international opponents have branded the election a farce. Election observers were on hand Tuesday from North Korea — a country even less tolerant of dissent than Syria — as well as from Mr. Assad’s allies Iran and Russia, along with Brazil, Zimbabwe and others. It remains to be seen if Mr. Assad, after claiming a new term, can or will fulfill pledges to end the war and rebuild the shattered country. For some opponents of the government, it was time to take stock. Several civilian activists in neighboring Lebanon said it was time to stop encouraging false hopes, and to urge fellow Syrians to “arrange their lives” assuming Mr. Assad would stay. One said she planned to carry a sign through Beirut reading, “We lost and Assad won.”
“Anyone who talks to me about resistance and continuing the revolution, I will punch him in the face,” she said, asking not to be named because the Syrian government exercises strong influence in Lebanon.
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