In the days before Syria’s new People’s Assembly convened, I kept passing by its building in the heart of Damascus. The trees around it were freshly trimmed, the entrance cleaned, the facade well-lit at night. It looked neat. It also looked empty. The building sits at the corner of Salhiyya, a commercial district in one of the liveliest parts of the city. For six decades under the Baath Party, Syrians walked past it without a second look. There was nothing inside worth looking at. Now, it was being polished in anticipation of a parliament that many Syrians complained had taken too long to arrive.
On July 12, it finally convened. The roads around it were choked for hours; the security presence was heavy; and the members were sworn in collectively, in one group. The head of the higher elections committee explained that this would save time and preserve the security of the session. It was a rare official acknowledgment of how fragile the situation in Syria still is.
Then the members started to argue about how to vote. Should candidates who lose one position be allowed to run for another? Should members vote by raising their hands, or should those who object stand up instead?
The acting speaker, the oldest member in the chamber, eventually lost his patience. “Please,” he said, “everyone wants to give me a lecture on procedure and law. We have no procedures and no law. This is an entirely new matter.”
Few moments captured the day better. Syria is not restoring a parliament. It is relearning parliamentary politics almost from scratch, after more than six decades during which the institution existed mainly to ratify what the president had already decided.
Syria’s new parliament is neither a democratic legislature nor a rubber stamp. It is an attempt at a controlled political opening, a legislature meant to help a strong presidency govern a fragile transition without turning into a rival.
But this does not mean that it is doomed to irrelevance. If Syria’s president is strategic, its parliamentarians courageous, its citizens insistent, and its international friends supportive, the People’s Assembly could become a meaningful power center in its own right. Controlled openings do not always escape their architects. But they develop politics of their own, and Syria’s already has.
Many will be tempted to dismissSyria’s parliament as meaningless. They will have good reasons. Start with how the assembly was formed. One-third of its 210 members, 70 in all, were appointed directly by President Ahmed al-Sharaa. The rest were chosen indirectly, through electoral colleges designed by a higher elections committee that Sharaa himself appointed. There was no popular vote. Candidates were told that they could run only as individuals, not as parties or lists.
The result is a parliament with a thin connection to the people it is supposed to represent. Most members never ran anything resembling a campaign. They did not knock on doors or stand in front of crowds and ask for votes. Many only began introducing themselves to the public after they had already won, posting on social media about who they are. Over the past month, I kept asking Syrians to name one member of parliament, any member. Most could not name a single one.
The institution is unfamiliar even to those inside it. None of the members have served in a real legislature before. Syria has not had one for more than six decades. They are still discovering what powers they hold, what the constitutional declaration allows them to do, and what it does not. That was visible on the floor of the first session, where members argued over the most basic questions of how a parliament conducts itself.
The declaration does not give them much to work with. Article 30 allows the assembly to propose and pass laws, amend or repeal old ones, ratify treaties, approve the budget, and hold hearings with ministers. That is where the list ends. There is no vote of confidence in the government and no real tools to compel the executive to do anything. Hearings let ministers explain themselves, but they don’t let parliament hold them accountable.
Representation has its own flaws. The three seats of Suwayda, a southern governorate with a Druze majority, remain vacant. Sharaa has apparently preferred to wait until all Syrian territory is consolidated before those seats are filled, and by a coincidence, the first session fell almost exactly a year after the clashes in southern Syria began. Some Kurdish parties, for their part, rejected the way that representatives for Kurdish areas were selected, objecting that the seats set aside for Kurds were far too few. Whether the numbers bear out the claim, the perception itself feeds doubts about the assembly’s ability to speak for the country.
The first session confirmed this picture. The members elected as speaker Abdul Hamid al-Awak, a judge who helped write the constitutional declaration itself and who is seen as close to the presidency. In his acceptance speech, Awak emphasized collective work and addressed the executive branch directly. We will cooperate with you, he told them, and we will facilitate legislation to the maximum of our ability.
The word “oversight” did not come up all day. Even the head of the elections committee, opening the session, described a parliament that would focus on reconstruction, of the stone and of the human, and would legislate. Monitoring the government was not on his list.
So give the skeptics their due: This is a weak parliament—by design—that is closely tied to the presidency and only narrowly representative.
Weak, however, is not the same as inconsequential. Even before the first session convened, members were competing over the speakership. Coalitions began to form—some regional, built around Aleppo, Damascus, and the eastern provinces, and some ideological, between members close to the presidency, Islamists, and others seen as liberals. Three candidates ran for speaker. Awak won with 99 votes out of 205, against 75 for Mouayad al-Qablawi and 31 for a third candidate. Those following the vote in Damascus still debate which candidate the presidency actually wanted. Either answer makes the same point: In a chamber where a third of the members owe their seats directly to the president, the palace’s preference, whatever it was, did not decide the outcome.
Something changed the day that the members were sworn in. Another center of power now exists in Syria. It is weak, but it exists. Under Bashar al-Assad, Syrians mockingly called the parliament the assembly of clapping.
That is why two small details of Sunday’s session stayed with me. The first is that the whole day was broadcast live on state television—arguments, confusion, contested votes, and all. Under the old regime, the parliament appeared on state TV to perform unanimity. On Sunday, Syrians watched their members disagree in real time. The second is that when Sharaa spoke, nobody clapped. The members applauded their own votes, their new speaker, their procedures. For the president, silence. Maybe they were instructed. Even so, someone understood that legitimacy in this chamber has to look different now, and that in itself is new.
On paper, the chamber’s composition tells one story, while its early behavior is telling another. Only 22 members are women, and 15 of them were appointed rather than elected, a number that drew criticism the day that the lists came out.
Then came the race for the two deputy speaker positions. Ten members ran, and four were women, announcing their candidacies from the floor. Madonna Bishara won the second deputy seat and spoke afterward of her interest in women’s rights and issues. Women hold a 10th of the chamber but made up nearly half the field for a leadership position.
The coming weeks and months will offer a series of indicators suggesting just how much of a real political role Syria’s parliament might have. For starters, the assembly has one month to write its own rules, and whether it copies what it is handed or argues its way to something of its own will say a lot about its temperament.
Article 30 enables the body to summon ministers and question them. If months pass and no minister sits before a committee, or ministers come only to present and be thanked, then the cooperation that Awak promised will have become the whole story. If a hearing ever ends with a minister changing course, something new will have happened in Syrian politics.
Another thing to watch will be what members do in their districts. Most of them never campaigned and never built the habit of answering to the people whose areas they hold. Balancing local and national representation is one of the things that this country is relearning again from scratch, and members who root themselves in their constituencies will be building a source of legitimacy that does not depend on the presidency.
Then there is the question of parties. There are no political parties in the parliament right now, and the new speaker’s talk of collective work suggests that a parties law is not coming soon. But this may not matter as much as people think. The blocs that formed around the speakership will keep forming. The only question is whether Syria organizes that competition in the open or pretends for a few more years that it does not exist.
Finally, watch what happens as the parliament’s 30 months term runs down. The constitutional declaration says the assembly’s term is renewable, but not by whom, or how, or whether the president will appoint another third of the body all over again. How this ambiguity gets resolved matters. Everyone in the chamber knows that the transition’s declared destination is a permanent constitution and elected parliaments under it, even if no one knows when this will occur. A member who builds a real base in his district is hedging against every version of Syria’s future. A member who relies on renewal from above is betting on only one. Which bet they make will shape the institution more than any article in the declaration.
The rest of the world can play an important role in making Syria’s parliament more relevant. Governments, parliaments, and organizations dealing with Syria should engage this assembly as an institution, not route everything through the presidential palace. Invite its committees, train its staff, answer its questions. Engagement will not make it independent. But treating it as an appendage of the executive guarantees that it remains one, and Syria’s transition needs more centers of power, not fewer.
What would success look like? Not a parliament that topples ministers or blocks the president. That misreads the moment. The best realistic case is quieter. Within a month, the assembly writes bylaws that are genuinely its own. Its committees begin calling ministers, and the hearings slowly turn from courtesy into scrutiny. Members discover that the budget, which they alone can approve, is leverage. The blocs that formed around the speakership harden into something like proto-parties, openly, rather than in WhatsApp groups. Members spend their weeks in their districts and return to Damascus carrying demands, and people who could not name a single parliamentarian start calling one when electricity bills soar, lines get long at gas stations, or the state’s wheat price shortchanges their harvests.
None of that would make Syria a democracy. It would make the parliament a habit, an address where power is argued over, not merely announced.
At the end of the first session, the newly elected secretary of the assembly rose to speak. “History will not record who won today,” he told the members. “It will record how this session was managed, how Syrians gathered again under the parliament’s dome. The parliaments that come after us will follow our steps. If we are weak, they will be weak. If we are strong, they will be strong.”
It was the truest thing said in the chamber all day.