The committee which organised Syria’s first parliamentary elections since the fall of Bashar al-Assad has acknowledged “significant shortcomings”, after results showed only 13% of the seats contested were won by female and minority candidates.
Observers said six women and 10 members of religious and ethnic minorities were among the 119 people elected to the new People’s Assembly on Sunday.
There was no direct popular vote. Instead, electoral colleges are selecting representatives for two-thirds of the 210 seats. Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa is appointing the rest.
An election committee spokesman said the president’s choices might “compensate” for the underrepresented components of society.
Twenty-one seats were not filled because the polls were postponed for security reasons in two Kurdish-controlled provinces in the north, and a third in the south which has seen deadly fighting between government forces and Druze militias.
Sharaa declared that the elections were a “historic moment” during a visit to a polling station and said the parliament would play an “important oversight role” during its 30-month term.
He promised a democratic and inclusive political transition after his Sunni Islamist group led the lightning rebel offensive that overthrew the Assad regime last December, ending a 13-year civil war that killed more than 600,000 people and displaced another 12 million.
However, the country has been rocked by several waves of deadly sectarian violence since then, fuelling fear and distrust among minorities.
Sunday’s polls were overseen by the Higher Committee for the Syrian People’s Assembly Elections, whose 11 members were chosen by the president in June.
They, in turn, appointed sub-committees which were tasked with selecting up to 7,000 members of 140 electoral colleges covering 60 districts.
The candidates representing the 50 districts where voting took place all had to be electoral college members. Supporters of “the former regime or terrorist organisations” were barred from membership, as were advocates of “secession, division or seeking foreign intervention”.
In the end, women made up 14% of the 1,500 candidates, according to the Higher Committee.
However, there were no quotas for female lawmakers, nor for those from the country’s many ethnic and religious minorities.
After publishing the preliminary election results on Monday, higher election committee spokesman Nawar Najmeh was asked by journalists to comment on the representation of women and Christians.
“Among the most significant shortcomings of the electoral process were the unsatisfactory results for Syrian women’s representation, and the fact that Christian representation was limited to two seats, a weak representation relative to the number of Christians in Syria,” he told a news conference.
Election observers told Reuters news agency that two members of Assad’s Alawite sect and several ethnic Kurds also won seats.
The US estimates that 10% of Syria’s 24 million population is Christian. Sunni Muslims constitute 74%, other Muslim sects 13%, and Druze 3%.
Najmeh suggested that “the president’s third [of the seats] could compensate” for some underrepresented components of society.
He also insisted that authorities were “serious about having supplementary ballots” in the northern provinces of Raqqa and Hassakeh, which are mostly controlled by a Kurdish-led militia alliance, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
However, he said the polls there would be linked to progress between the government and the SDF on the implementation of a March agreement to integrate all Kurdish-led military and civilian institutions into the state.
The Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political umbrella of the SDF-affiliated Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria (AANES), said the elections “did not represent the Syrian people’s will, and did not represent all regions and communities in the country”.
On Tuesday, Defence Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra said he had agreed to a comprehensive ceasefire with the SDF’s leader, Mazloum Abdi, following recent clashes in two Kurdish-majority neighbourhoods of the northern city of Aleppo.
The AANES accused the army of attacking residents of Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maksoud on Monday, while the interior ministry said the clashes erupted after the SDF shelled army checkpoints.
The government also holds little sway in the southern province of Suweida, where tensions with the predominantly Druze population have remained high since the sectarian violence there three months ago.
The violence erupted when Druze militias clashed with Sunni Bedouin tribes, which prompted the government to send its forces to intervene. More than 1,000 people were killed in the fighting, most of them Druze, according to monitoring groups.
One Druze cleric in Suweida, Fadi Badria, told the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights the elections represented only the authority of what he called the “terrorist” interim government, and that they would “not be recognised by the province”.
