Why I’m Not Optimistic About Democracy in Syria 

After a decade and a half of brutal conflict, the Syrian Civil War ended with Bashar al-Assad’s ouster at the hands of a rebel faction. What began in 2011 as peaceful protests during the Arab Spring spiraled after Assad’s regime answered placards and demonstrations with airstrikes and chemical weapons. The uprising became a grinding civil war that drew in regional and global powers, killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced millions. Now, with Assad gone, Syrians have been facing a familiar question: will the end of dictatorship lead to democracy—or simply mark the rise of another strongman? 

Things are moving quickly. Last week, rebel-turned-leader Ahmad al-Sharaa (he’s shed his nom de guerre Al-Julani) became the first Syrian president to address the U.N. General Assembly in 58 years. Early next month, the country is scheduled to hold its first parliamentary elections since the fall of Assad. A third of the seats will be appointed directly by President al-Sharaa himself, and the ballot will exclude Druze and Kurdish provinces—making for hardly an auspicious start to Syria’s democratic experiment.  

This matters because the Syrian case fits into a broader puzzle that scholars have wrestled with for decades: why the Arab world has remained resistant to democracy even as other regions moved in the opposite direction. For most of history, Arab authoritarianism did not stand out as unusual. Until the 1970s, most people lived under various illiberal regimes. Bleak as the situation was in Arab societies in terms of authoritarian entrenchment, it was not exceptional. 

In the 1970s, however, global change began to take shape. First, southern Europe broke free from illiberalism in Greece, Portugal, and Spain. Then, from the early 1980s onward, democratic transitions ended military rule in countries like Argentina, Brazil, and others in Latin America, eventually culminating in the dramatic fall of the Pinochet regime in Chile. By the late 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet Union opened the way for democratization across Eastern Europe. In Eastern Germany, the fall of communist rule ended the nightmare of the Stasi surveillance state. In Romania, long-time dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad. The difficult journey of former communist regimes toward democracy and EU membership began. Even China and Russia, two long-standing centers of illiberalism, seemed to be making democratic efforts—China when the events in Tiananmen Square briefly lifted liberals’ hopes in 1989, and Russia under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. By mid-1995, what Samuel Huntington called “Democracy’s Third Wave” had truly transformed the world.  

However, Arab states remained an exception to the democratizing trend. In fact, dynasticism was making autocratic Arab republics operate like monarchies. This was true in Egypt, where Gamal Mubarak was being groomed to replace his father Hosni Mubarak; and in Yemen, where Ahmad al-Saleh was reportedly preparing himself to inherit his father Ali Abdullah al-Saleh; and in Syria, where Bashar al-Asad succeeded his father Hafiz al-Asad as ruler of the country, when Hafiz died in 2000. As for Lebanon, the once shining exception to the general rule of Arab illiberal governance, it had descended into civil war in 1975 and emerged 15 years later as a broken country and a satellite state of autocratic Syria.  

By the 1990s and 2000s, it was clear the Arab world was diverging from the global march toward democracy. While Europe, Latin America, and Eastern Europe shed authoritarian rule, much of the Middle East was moving in the opposite direction—deepening its illiberalism. Arab immigrants abroad mostly thrived in and contributed to democratic societies, but at home, their countries remained locked in autocracy. Was there anything “exceptional” about such societies, making them, for whatever reason, be it institutional, structural, or cultural, especially inimical to democratic rule? And because autocratic rule persisted after the dramatic failure of the 2011 democratic uprisings in the Arab world, the question remains as fundamental today as it was back in the 1990s. Why are Arab states unfriendly to democracy?       

This interrogation has been on my mind for years, but never more acutely since the breakdown of Assad’s rule in Syria. Assad was a criminal dictator who would not be missed. Still, I suspected shortly after his downfall that Damascus was replacing one strongman with another, exactly like Iran did when it traded the Shah for Khomeini. Or like Egypt did when the process that began with the breakdown of the Mubarak regime paved the way to the rise of the (arguably even more repressive) Sisi regime. Although it may be too soon to bury all democratic hopes in Syria, the signs in the wake of Assad’s downfall have been discouraging. 

Syria today embodies the dilemmas that have haunted the Arab world for decades: fractured identities, entrenched majorities, centralized power, and the fusion of religion and politics. Assad is gone, but the structures of despotism remain. I hope I am wrong—but for now, Syria’s democratic prospects look vanishingly small. Let me venture the following observations:  

Nation-Building Without a Nation 

European countries tackled nation-building first and only later transitioned toward democracy. Long before France, Spain, and Portugal held competitive elections, their peoples already shared a constructed national identity. That coherence made democratization possible. 

Syria, by contrast, must attempt both tasks at once—nation-building and democratization—and neither is easy. The Kurdish question illustrates the dilemma. Does the Arab majority regard Syrian Kurds as fellow citizens, or as interlopers? And do Kurdish leaders see their future inside a democratic Syria, or outside it, in a separate national homeland? The very legitimacy of the Syrian state is at stake. Under such circumstances, democratization inevitably takes a backseat. The same tension is visible among the Druze. When their leader Hikmat al-Hijri speaks of creating an “Iqlim Munfasil”—a separate Druze province—does he envision autonomy within Syria, or independence from it? These questions raise a single, destabilizing possibility: will Syria remain united, or will it implode? 

What is certain is that Syrians are being asked to manage a democratic transition while they still disagree over their country’s very identity. Simply put, democratization is unlikely while the nation itself remains in dispute. 

The Tyranny of Permanent Majorities 

Majoritarianism is a second major obstacle to democratization in Syria. Various representatives of Syrian Christian communities have repeatedly made clear since the breakdown of the Assad regime that they object to living under Sharia law—and yet, Syria’s new constitutional declaration stipulates explicitly that the president must be Muslim, and that Islamic jurisprudence serves as the principal source of legislation. Such stipulations unmistakably make Syrian Christians second-class citizens in their own country. The Druze, Alawis, and Ismailis are also unenthusiastic about a constitutional order based upon Islam and the Shariah, and they, like the Christians, are constantly reminded that they are minorities and that Sunnis form an overwhelming majority of Syrians.  

In theory, democracy rests on the tension between majority and minority: the former governs, the latter forms the opposition until roles reverse. Crucially, this only works when the dividing line shifts with political alliances and voter preferences. In the United States, for example, Republicans may hold power today, but Democrats can win it back in the next cycle. The popular vote in the U.S. swings from one election to another, and, at least since the civil rights movement, no single majority group has enjoyed permanent dominance. 

Syria offers no such fluidity. Arab Sunnis will always be the demographic majority, while Christians, Druze, Alawis, Ismailis, and Kurds will remain permanent minorities. When the lines of political division are drawn along fixed sectarian identities, rather than changeable political choices, majoritarianism becomes tyranny. A system that condemns entire communities to perpetual minority status cannot be democratic in any meaningful sense. 

Centralization and Strongman Politics 

Majoritarianism often goes hand in hand with centralized government, where power is hoarded at the center rather than shared through federal arrangements. For dominant groups, centralization is attractive: it allows the machinery of the state to become an instrument of control and hegemony. 

Ahmad al-Sharaa, Syria’s new strongman, has made his hostility to federalism explicit. Since taking power, he has rejected any system granting autonomy to minorities or regions. The constitutional declaration reflects that vision. It concentrates authority in his hands, giving him the power to appoint members of the judiciary and legislature with no real checks or oversight. 

This Jacobin instinct—to flatten local diversity in favor of centralized rule—has deep roots in authoritarian thought. In Syria, it ensures that even after Assad, political life remains organized around the supremacy of one man at the center. Such a system is the opposite of democratic governance. 

Religion and the State 

Finally, the relationship between religion and state is another obstacle to democracy in Arab states, and Syria is unlikely to be an exception. Ahmad al-Sharaa has tried to distance himself from overtly Islamist factions, but the ideology of his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham movement is clear: Syria is a Muslim-majority country, and its laws should be grounded in Sharia. This is not empty marketing. Already, references to the Big Bang theory and to Charles Darwin and evolution have been ordered to be scrubbed from school curricula on the grounds that they are “un-Islamic.”  

Sharia does not necessarily preclude regular elections, but it does impede equality between citizens. It places Muslims above non-Muslims, men above women, heterosexuals above homosexuals, and believers above atheists. It also imposes severe limits on personal freedoms, including the freedom of expression. At best, Syria could hope for an illiberal democracy under a Sharia-inspired order—and even that is uncertain. 

These dynamics are not specific to Syria alone in the Arab world. Most Arab societies struggle with issues about nation-building, majoritarianism, and the relationship between Islam and the state. But nowhere in the Arab world are these dynamics colliding with more intensity than in Syria today. And democratic prospects there remain dim.  

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