The spectacular and unforeseen fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 upended Syria’s political order and launched a precarious transition. Ahmed al-Sharaa officially assumed the role of interim president on January 29, 2025, serving as the head of a coalition dominated by members of the now disbanded Islamist militia that he had led, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and a transitional government composed of technocrats and opposition-linked figures. In March 2025, the new authorities issued a constitutional declaration establishing a five-year transitional period at the end of which national elections are envisaged to take place. On October 5, 2025, indirect elections took place for 119 representatives to a new 210-member parliament. On November 10, 2025, al-Sharaa met with US President Donald Trump at the White House—an indication that the Trump administration views developments in Damascus as moving in the right direction.
Despite Syria’s political progress in the past year, immense challenges remain. Decades of authoritarianism and more than 10 years of civil war hollowed out Syria’s institutions, devastated its economy, and tore apart its social fabric. Al-Sharaa and his government face the formidable task of rebuilding governance while navigating the competing agendas of foreign powers including Iran, Israel, the Gulf states, Turkey, Russia, and the United States.
It is surely too soon to talk about a democratizing Syria, but the new institutions that have emerged represent a modest re‑entry into electoral politics after years of personalist rule, governance collapse, and a brutal civil war. The significance of Syria’s reform steps so far lies not in their democratic quality, but in the political expectations and habits that they may begin to create among the citizenry. Although fragile and contested, these developments place Syria at a pivotal juncture: the country could move toward genuine participatory governance, or relapse into authoritarianism.
The Constitutional Declaration and the October Elections
There are grounds for cautious optimism. The first meaningful constitutional reset in decades, the March 2025 declaration marked an attempt to restructure Syria’s governmental institutions and to chart a roadmap for a new political order. Under the new constitutional framework, the president retains decisive power over the security services, key ministries, judicial appointments, and forming the government. During the transition period, the president sits at the apex of authority with few direct checks. The declaration, however, envisages a five-year transition to elected rule and outlines mechanisms for accountability and transitional justice. It also re-legitimizes civil and political organization after years of repression, providing space—however constrained—for civil society networks, opposition movements, the diaspora, and minority communities to organize and to articulate demands.
The president retains decisive power over ministries, courts, and government formation.
The October 2025 indirect elections reinforced this opening, symbolically breaking with the past by creating a People’s Assembly to replace Assad’s rubber-stamp parliament. By law, the new body has 210 members, 140 of whom are supposed to be chosen by appointed local committees and the remaining 70 of whom are to be selected by the president himself. The establishment of the Assembly is a welcome departure from the Assad regime-controlled legislatures, and the dismantling of the Baathist electoral machinery and the potential emergence of a relatively more diverse slate of candidates (though still restricted) are meaningful steps. To cast a ballot after over a decade of civil war was an important symbolic act for those Syrians who were chosen to participate, signaling an early step toward political normalization and offering reform-minded actors a foothold to shape the transition.
Yet the electoral process was flawed, and Syrian critics immediately denounced the vote as authoritarian consolidation. First, the indirect voting system for two-thirds of the Assembly members, and the president’s appointment of the rest, significantly diluted the popular will. The process was quite complicated. Per Law No. 143 of 2025, al-Sharaa appointed an 11-member Supreme Committee for the People’s Assembly Elections, which then appointed local subcommittees for each electoral district of 30 to 50 members. Only those people were allowed to vote. Institutional controls over the process essentially gave al-Sharaa, and secondarily local elites and powerbrokers aligned with him, outsized influence on the composition of the Assembly.
Second, candidate eligibility was tightly restricted. At the outset, the process excluded anyone who had supported the former regime, advocated for secession, or competed in Assad-era elections. Then the pool of candidates for the 140 elected seats was limited to the highly vetted and appointed members of the local district subcommittees, who could nominate themselves. Extremely short nomination windows and a tightly controlled appeals process further narrowed the pool of candidates. Furthermore, as mentioned, fully one-third of the Assembly is to be chosen by the president. Together, these measures all but guaranteed the selection of a majority bloc loyal to the executive, blunting parliament’s capacity to act as an independent check on presidential authority.
In addition, several regions—Raqqa and parts of Hasaka governorates in the northeast, and al-Suwayda in the south—were excluded from the October 5 voting, ostensibly for security reasons or because of contested administrative control. This delay left 21 of the 140 elected seats vacant, to be chosen at an unspecified later date. The new Assembly is unrepresentative in other respects. The elected membership is geographically skewed: Aleppo received 32 seats and Idlib 12 seats, compared to 10 for Damascus and 12 for Damascus suburbs (known as Damascus countryside). In total, only six women and 10 minority representatives were elected, leaving the Assembly dominated by Sunni Arab men—hardly a full representation of Syria’s diverse social composition. While the system was presented as a temporary arrangement justified by administrative and security constraints, these limitations, as well as the centrality of the president in the process, underscore the limits of Syria’s political opening.
Rising Popular Demands
Public sentiment, meanwhile, is shifting in ways that both enable and constrain the transition. Expectations are high, especially among younger and urban Syrians who have endured conflict and economic hardship but are increasingly conversant in the language of reform, rights, and accountability, having been exposed through digital networks, diaspora engagement, and local civil initiatives. Their demands revolve mostly around daily grievances such as reliable electricity and water, access to jobs, and protection from security actors. Minority and ethnic communities are mobilizing around demands for decentralization, representation, and cultural protection, long-standing political claims. In the northeast, the autonomous administration dominated by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), originally an offshoot of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), continues to push for institutionalized decentralization and recognition of linguistic and cultural rights. In al-Suwayda, members of the Druze community empowered by years of autonomous de facto governance during the civil war have renewed calls for local decision-making, judicial autonomy, and protection from Damascus-appointed security chiefs. Even Christian communities in Homs and the coastal belt—areas traditionally aligned with the state—are increasingly vocal about equitable reconstruction and property restitution.
Syrians may not expect rapid democratization, but they expect visible relief.
For the al-Sharaa government, this creates a double challenge: while rising expectations provide a social base to legitimize the transition, failure to deliver on tangible improvements in services, security, or economic progress risks eroding the fragile consensus that enabled the new government’s recognition and support. Syrians may not expect rapid democratization, but after years of suffering, they expect visible relief. If the state cannot meet those expectations—if electricity remains sporadic, checkpoints abusive, or reconstruction captured by the same war-era elites—the reform narrative will collapse, and so will the credibility of the transition.
External Actors
Syria’s renewed regional engagement with Gulf and Turkish partners has introduced external incentives for reform, even if some of these remain uneven and, at times, contradictory. Gulf states, while signaling openness to economic re-engagement, have neither committed large-scale reconstruction aid nor attached explicit political reform conditions, conveying instead basic expectations about state stabilization, border security, and curbing drug trafficking as prerequisites for deeper investment. Turkey has conditioned its rapprochement primarily on security arrangements in the north, not on democratic reforms.
So far, the only major donor conditioning some assistance and restoration of diplomatic relations on measurable progress in governance is the European Union (EU). It has maintained a clearer stance, saying that it would only assist reconstruction when a “genuine, comprehensive, and inclusive transition” is underway. In the meantime, it agreed to gradually suspend sanctions pending progress on protections for minorities as well as respect for human rights and women’s rights. The EU and EU member states have pledged a total of some 3.4 billion euros to Syria, and public statements by these and other donors can create pressure on al-Sharaa’s government to demonstrate visible signs of political change.
All these factors point to a limited but potentially meaningful opening for political evolution in Syria. The new constitutional framework, the conduct of elections (however constrained), rising societal expectations, and Syria’s reemergence on the regional stage have all introduced new arenas of contestation and negotiation—in the People’s Assembly, and at the interface between Damascus and external donors. These factors may strengthen reform-minded actors within state and society—technocrats in key ministries, local government, and civil society activists seeking more accountable governance and some parliamentary figures. Syria’s trajectory may be best understood as one of “managed opening,” a controlled and gradual expansion of space for participation, debate, and accountability that, if sustained and broadened, could eventually lay the foundation for deeper institutional reform.
Structural Challenges
Beneath this tentative transition lie structural barriers that could easily derail democratization. Decades of centralized rule, the militarization of the economy, entrenched patronage networks, institutional decay, and resistance from former wartime business elites and remnants of Assad-era security services all threaten to neutralize reform before it matures.
Territorial fragmentation remains a key problem. Although Damascus has reasserted its authority over major cities and western corridors, large areas of the northeast remain outside the reach of the central state—though the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have agreed in principle to integrate into government forces. Israel’s repeated strikes and expanded occupation of Syrian territory undermine Syrian sovereignty and the new government’s authority. In this environment, Syria lacks the state capacity and stability to sustain more ambitious reforms.
Institutional weakness compounds these challenges. A decade of war has gutted Syria’s bureaucracy. The recent People’s Assembly election was conducted without a reliable census or voter registry and only partly operational local courts. The authorities cited “lack of infrastructure” and population displacement to justify indirect voting. But without a serious program of administrative rebuilding—including training civil servants, digitizing records, and restoring fiscal oversight—technocratic incapacity may become a pretext for indefinite delay.
Arguably the greatest barrier to democratization is the enduring power of the security apparatus (the infamous mukhabarat) and the war economy that sustained it. For half a century, the Baathist system fused coercion and patronage into a single governing logic. Even after Assad has fallen, this infrastructure of control persists. Former security officials, army-linked businessmen, and militia-business networks—all deeply intertwined—retain political and economic power, commanding lucrative smuggling networks, reconstruction contracts, and access to foreign exchange. The new government has seized assets previously controlled by regime insiders, but other former regime networks continue to operate under new names and to function as instruments of rent extraction. The resistance of these entrenched elites and war profiteers who dominate key sectors of the economy—and who have even become key players in the emerging economy of the new Syria, despite al-Sharaa’s disapproval—is a formidable obstacle.
Without a comprehensive security-sector reform program, democratization will remain rhetorical.
Captagon seizures and the arrest of Wassim Assad, cousin of ousted president Bashar al-Assad, and former militia leaders underline that old war-economy pipelines are still active, even as new elites try to replace these networks with their own. This dynamic was corroborated by a recent Reuters probe that revealed that a tight circle around al-Sharaa’s brother is increasingly wielding economic influence through Assad-era megaprojects that are being pushed via the same holding companies. The al-Sharaa government thus inherits a deeply securitized system in which loyalties (and revenue sources) resist democratic oversight. Without a comprehensive security-sector reform program—one that includes vetting, integration, and fiscal transparency—democratization will remain rhetorical. In such an environment, reconstruction risks becoming a rent system, courts a venue for factional competition, parliament a facade and media a tool of control, rendering reform performative rather than transformative.
Against this backdrop, Syria’s transition under al-Sharaa is likely to produce a tightly managed political order rather than a genuine democratic opening. The presidency’s continued control over security institutions, electoral design, and administrative appointments, together with the resilience of wartime economic elites, makes authoritarian consolidation the default trajectory—even as the government uses the language of reform to secure recognition and financial support.
Modest openings may still appear in the People’s Assembly, local government, or civil society, driven by domestic pressure for better governance and by external incentives tied to stabilization and reconstruction. Yet these gains are likely to be partial and reversible, reflecting a system designed to signal change rather than to redistribute power. Renewed fragmentation is less likely than a hybrid arrangement that blends limited pluralism with enduring coercive structures.
The Way Forward
Under Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria has entered a fragile yet potentially pivotal phase of transition. Its trajectory will hinge on credible institutional reform, participatory governance, effective capacity-building, and sustained regional and international support. While the current situation resembles a managed opening, real democratic transformation will remain elusive unless Syria restructures its security sector, dismantles entrenched war-economy networks, curbs patronage-based governance, and delivers tangible improvements to daily life. If al-Sharaa’s administration can achieve these goals, Syria might make political progress. But if it relies on coercion, exclusion, and patronage to preserve order, democratization will exist in name only.
International actors can support Syria’s transition with conditional aid, technical assistance, and coordinated diplomacy—but they cannot substitute for domestic political will. Syria’s transition offers a narrow but genuine window of opportunity, one that will close quickly if the leadership prioritizes control over consensus. The coming months will be pivotal in determining whether Syria moves forward with democratic reforms or slides back into authoritarianism.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: FB/Syrian Presidency
