Syrian MPs hold cautious hope for a democratic future

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Sitting in her dimly lit apartment as pickup trucks full of government gunmen prowled the streets outside, one of Syria’s new MPs dreams of a country where the security forces could be trusted and a feisty legislature keeps the government in check.

Instead, Lina Aizouqi fears she will struggle to be heard when she takes her seat as one of just six women, and one of only 10 representatives of religious minority groups, in Syria’s new interim parliament.

The men with guns on the streets of her hometown of Tartus are Sunni fighters, many of them veterans of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the ultraconservative Islamist militia that President Ahmed al-Sharaa led until seizing power last December. Cruising up and down the waterfront in Tartus – a city populated mainly by Alawites, members of the same religious sect as ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad – government troops look more like an occupying army than a police force protecting residents.

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Ms. Aizouqi, a member of the country’s small Ismaili Muslim community, says one of her first tasks will be to try and put an end to the idea that only Sunnis suffered under the Assad regime, and to ensure that the parliament serves all Syrians, regardless of their religion.

“All sects of this country have faced many challenges. Just because [the Sunnis] suffered, doesn’t mean that other people didn’t suffer as well,” Ms. Aizouqi says, sitting on a couch in her apartment, in a room lit only by a string of battery-powered lights. Tartus, like most Syrian cities, receives only a few hours of electricity per day from the government grid.

Pushing to improve services is an area where MPs hope they can influence Mr. al-Sharaa’s government. Fighting corruption and addressing the lawless security situation, are other issues expected to top Syria’s parliamentary agenda.

But nearly a month after they were elected, Syria’s new MPs say they have not yet been told when the first session of parliament will be, how often it will meet or even how much they’ll be paid. The interim legislature will sit until the security situation in the country calms enough for full-scale elections to be held. Syria has seen several large-scale outbreaks of sectarian violence over the past year, as well as near-daily shootings and kidnappings.

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Ms. Aizouqi, 41, says another priority will be to push for a law ensuring that police forces in cities like Tartus are drawn from the local population, rather than ex-HTS fighters sent by the central government. She also aspires to help direct the country’s postwar economic transition.

Though she has a PhD in economics and lectures at the University of Tartus, Ms. Aizouqi knows it will be a battle to make her voice heard in a parliament dominated by conservative Sunni men.

“Some of the people I want to debate with might not even talk to me,” she says, referring to key HTS figures who believe women should act deferentially towards men and not be in positions of power.

Many questions linger over Syria’s new parliament, which is still in the process of being formed. So far, 122 of 210 seats have been filled via mini-elections on Oct. 5 that saw MPs chosen by electoral colleges of several hundred local citizens, which were in turn appointed by a government committee. (Ms. Aizouqi was chosen over one other candidate by a group of 500 electors in Tartus.)

Another 72 seats are set to be directly appointed by Mr. al-Sharaa, who is expected to try and address international concerns over the interim parliament’s lack of women and minorities. Another 16 seats remain vacant after it proved impossible to hold elections in the semi-autonomous Kurdish areas in the northeast of the country, as well as the central Suwayda region, which has been plagued by violence between Druze and Bedouin fighters.

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Also unclear is whether legislators will have the ability to provide a genuine check on Mr. al-Sharaa’s government or whether they will be expected to rubber-stamp his decrees, as the Baath Party-controlled parliaments did in Mr. al-Assad’s day.

“The first thing I want to do is ban clapping,” says Nizar al-Madani, one of 10 newly elected MPs from Damascus, referring to how Baath Party parliamentarians would interrupt Mr. al-Assad’s speeches with repeated standing ovations and even recitations of poetry praising the dictator.

Mr. al-Madani, a 44-year-old doctor who describes himself as a conservative Islamist, says he – like Ms. Aizouqi – hopes parliament can act primarily as a check on corruption and to help guide the government’s path.

However, he dismissed concerns that women and minorities are under-represented in the interim parliament.

“Sunnis make up 85 to 90 per cent of the country’s fabric. So, if our parliament consists of 85 to 90 per cent Sunnis, this is natural,” he says. (Syria’s pre-war population was estimated to be 74 per cent Sunni. There has been nothing like a census since the end of the civil war, which is estimated to have killed more than 600,000 people and driven more than six million others – or roughly one in three Syrians – to flee the country.)

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Asked which country the new Syria and its parliamentarians might look to as a model, Mr. al-Madani points to Turkey, which was the main backer of HTS and other anti-Assad forces throughout Syria’s 13-year war.

Turkey now stands at a dangerous crossroads between Western-style democracy and autocracy, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who also comes from an Islamist background, ruling for the past 11 years. But Mr. al-Madani argues that Turkey’s most recent election in 2023, which Mr. Erdogan narrowly won with 52 per cent of the vote, showed Turkish democracy was alive and functioning well.

Still, Mr. al-Madani says he hoped that Mr. al-Sharaa – who effectively appointed himself president after the fall of the regime but has promised to hold elections within four years – wouldn’t try to remain in power as long as Mr. Erdogan, or Mr. al-Assad, who clung to the presidency with an iron fist for 24 years.

“I do believe he is the right man in the right place currently,” Mr. al-Madani says of Mr. al-Sharaa. “If he were to remain for another 10 years, he would definitely overstay his welcome – and I want us to have the power to remove such figures.”