While I can absolutely see that elections in Syria will have to be done differently than in established democracies, this still seems like a bad way to handle them.
The process by which this is happening is a bureaucratic nightmare, even for an electoral system. Each of the country’s electoral districts will have 30-50 member subcommittees chosen non-democratically, who will select members for their district. Furthermore, Al-Sharaa will simply appoint 70 members of parliament directly. This process is not only extremely open to graft and corruption, but is also occurring over the course of a week with little to no public campaigning. It’s opaque, it’s easily corruptible, and I can see how ordinary Syrians do not have faith in it.
I fear that if Syrians’ first experience with electoral democracy is this convoluted, it may turn them off of the project of democratic government entirely. Lets hope that this process will not be used for any further elections.
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While I can absolutely see that elections in Syria will have to be done differently than in established democracies, this still seems like a bad way to handle them.
The process by which this is happening is a bureaucratic nightmare, even for an electoral system. Each of the country’s electoral districts will have 30-50 member subcommittees chosen non-democratically, who will select members for their district. Furthermore, Al-Sharaa will simply appoint 70 members of parliament directly. This process is not only extremely open to graft and corruption, but is also occurring over the course of a week with little to no public campaigning. It’s opaque, it’s easily corruptible, and I can see how ordinary Syrians do not have faith in it.
I fear that if Syrians’ first experience with electoral democracy is this convoluted, it may turn them off of the project of democratic government entirely. Lets hope that this process will not be used for any further elections.