Syria's politics: a five-year interim charter and an appointed third

What the Constitutional Declaration sets up

The constitution of 2012 stopped working when the Assad government fell on 8 December 2024. At the Syrian Revolution Victory Conference on 29 January 2025 the spokesman of the Military Operations Command announced its formal dissolution, and the same conference banned the parties of the Baathist National Progressive Front. A drafting committee was named on 2 March 2025, and the Constitutional Declaration it produced was signed on 13 March, valid for five years.

The declaration divides power in the familiar three ways. Legislative power lies with the People's Assembly, executive power with the government under the president's leadership, and judicial power with an independent judiciary whose judges are subject only to the law. Wikipedia's summary of the text records that it names Islamic law as the main source of jurisprudence while guaranteeing freedom of opinion and expression, and that it gives the assembly the job of overseeing the drafting of a permanent constitution.

What the declaration leaves to the president is the larger share. He commands the armed forces, appoints and dismisses ministers, and appoints one or more vice presidents and sets their powers; the Wikipedia account records the vice presidency as vacant since December 2024. He appoints a third of the People's Assembly and all the judges of the Constitutional Court without any confirmation by the assembly.

The veto is set out in Article 39. The president promulgates the laws the assembly passes and may object to one by a reasoned decision within a month; a law he objects to takes effect only if two-thirds of the assembly pass it again. Article 36 gives him the power to issue executive and regulatory decrees, and Article 41 lets him declare war or general mobilisation with the approval of the National Security Council.

The transitional government that took office on 29 March 2025 replaced the caretaker cabinet named in December 2024, and the post of prime minister went with it. Syrian and international organisations quoted by Syria Direct in October 2025 said the declaration concentrates power in the presidency and weakens the independence of the courts.

How the People's Assembly was chosen

The assembly has 210 seats. The president appoints 70 of them directly, and the other 140 were filled by indirect vote on 5 October 2025, the first such vote since December 2024. The voters were members of district electoral colleges formed by a Higher Committee for the elections, itself appointed by the president. They chose among 1,578 approved candidates, of whom 14% were women. There was no public campaign, and most citizens had no vote.

Voting did not take place in three governorates outside the government's control at the time, Sweida, Raqqa and Hasakah, which officials attributed to security. Syria Direct counted 19 seats reserved for them and the Council on Foreign Relations 21 to be filled in postponed votes. The term is 30 months and can be extended. If a member resigns, dies or is disqualified, the president chooses the replacement.

The electoral committee's own spokesman called the poor results for women and Christians "among the most significant shortcomings" of the vote, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. A statement by 14 Syrian civil society organisations in September 2025 described the process as "plagued by deep structural flaws", while acknowledging the difficulty of a direct general election with no census since 2010 and millions displaced. The decree governing the vote excluded anyone deemed a supporter of the former government, a member of a terrorist organisation or an advocate of separation. The assembly held its first session on 12 July 2026, after a delay from 6 July.

Why there are no political parties yet

The assembly it replaces was the People's Council of the Baath years, 250 seats elected in government-held areas. Its elections were rejected abroad: Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States refused to accept the results of the vote of 13 April 2016 before they were announced, and the Electoral Integrity Project's global report of 2022 described Syrian elections as a facade. Under the constitution of 2012 the president was elected directly and named a prime minister who answered, on paper, to the council.

From 1972 to 2011 only the parties of the National Progressive Front, led by the Baath, could operate. Decrees of 2011 and the constitution of 2012 allowed others to register, and Freedom House notes that they also set conditions that barred parties based on religion or region. Since the Front's parties were banned in January 2025 no new party law has been passed, and the Wikipedia account records that no major party had emerged by 2026.

The Constitutional Declaration guarantees the work of associations and trade unions but leaves the formation of political parties to a future law, as Syria Direct reported. Freedom House found no effort in 2025 to replace the legal framework for parties or campaigning. Wikipedia's account notes discussion among political figures of forming a "Syrian National Bloc", the name of the nationalist coalition of the mandate years, to counter what they called the transitional government's centralised authoritarianism.

How Freedom House scores the transition

Freedom House's report published in 2023 gave Syria 1 out of 100. The 2025 edition gave 5 and the 2026 edition 10, made up of minus 2 out of 40 for political rights and 12 out of 60 for civil liberties.

The 2026 report states the case for both readings. It records that ethnic and sectarian violence and other serious problems persisted after the transitional authorities took power, and it scores Syria 0 out of 4 on whether the chief national authority and the legislature were chosen in free and fair elections. It also records greater freedom for journalism and civil society and a more permissive climate for private expression than under the old government.

The two outbreaks of 2025 that weigh on that score were investigated by the UN Commission of Inquiry. In the coastal region in March about 1,400 people, mainly Alawite civilians, were reported killed, and in Sweida in July more than 1,700 people were killed and nearly 200,000 displaced. The Commission found violations by members of the government's forces and by armed groups opposed to them in both cases, and found no evidence of a government policy behind the coastal killings. The government named national inquiries and opened public trials over Sweida in July 2026.

Who governs the north-east and the south

The transitional government holds that Syria is a single centralised state, and the Arab Center in Washington, writing in February 2026, describes its president as opposed to regional autonomy. Two regions tested that position.

What happened to the Kurdish-led administration

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, formed in 2015 and backed by the United States against the Islamic State, held the north-east under the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. An agreement in March 2025 to merge it into the state was not carried out. Fighting broke out in Aleppo on 6 January 2026; 23 people were killed by the health ministry's count and up to 148,000 displaced before the SDF withdrew from the city on 10 January. Its Arab units in Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa then went over to the government, and by 18 January, by the Arab Center's estimate, the SDF had lost about 80% of the territory it held at the start of the year.

A ceasefire on 18 January and a comprehensive agreement later that month provided for SDF brigades to join the army as whole units and for the administration's offices and staff to pass into the state bureaucracy. A decree that week recognised Kurdish as a national language, made Newroz a paid public holiday and restored citizenship to Kurds left stateless by the 1962 census in Hasakah. The Kurdish administration called it "a first step" and asked for the rights to be written into a permanent constitution.

Why Sweida voted later

Sweida governorate, where most of Syria's Druze live, was one of the three where the October 2025 vote was postponed. The Commission of Inquiry recorded government forces, tribal fighters and Druze armed groups among those responsible for the killings there in July 2025, against Druze and Bedouin civilians in turn.

Who Syria stands with abroad

Syria was a founding member of the United Nations and of the Arab League in 1945. The international bodies that suspended it during the civil war have taken it back in stages:

Sanctions came off in steps. The United States issued general licences in January and May 2025, suspended the Caesar Act twice and repealed it outright on 18 December 2025 in its defence authorisation act, which requires a review of Syria's conduct every 180 days for four years. The Curtis law firm noted in December 2025 that individuals tied to the former government, Captagon trafficking, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda remained under sanction and that Syria was still designated a state sponsor of terrorism. The United Kingdom and the European Union eased their own sanctions in 2025, and the Bank of Canada agreed in March 2026 to open an account with the Central Bank of Syria.

Russia and Iran had been the old government's main military suppliers, and Bashar al-Assad was given asylum in Moscow. Turkey restored relations and has helped retrain the armed forces. The United States announced in February 2026 that it would reopen its embassy in Damascus, closed during the war.

What the dispute with Israel turns on

Syria's founding claim against Israel is the Golan Heights, occupied in June 1967 and annexed by Israeli law in 1981, a step the UN Security Council declared "null and void" in Resolution 497. Syrian governments have demanded its return ever since. After December 2024 a second line of dispute opened inside the 1974 disengagement lines: Israeli forces crossed the UN buffer zone within days of the fall of Damascus, carried out strikes on Syrian military sites and, by the Wikipedia account, demanded on 23 February 2025 the demilitarisation of the Quneitra, Daraa and Sweida governorates.

The two sides now state different aims. Israel says its new positions in Syria are meant to protect its security by enlarging the buffer zone, and describes some of its operations as protecting the Druze of the south-west. The transitional government condemns the presence as an occupation and, in talks held in Paris in January 2026 under an American envoy, sought Israel's withdrawal to the positions it held before December 2024 and a reciprocal security framework, as The National reported. The UN has repeatedly called on Israel to respect the agreement of 1974.

How the country is run below the centre

Syria is a unitary state of 14 governorates, each a muhafaza, divided into districts and sub-districts. Britannica describes the governors as holding some power in their provinces within a centralised system that depends on the interior ministry. Wikipedia's account notes proposals for decentralisation and the transitional government's preference for a single central administration, and the agreement of January 2026 with the SDF folded the north-eastern administration into the national bureaucracy instead of preserving it as a regional tier.