DAMASCUS, Syria – Syrians made their Way to polling stations on Sunday in spaces controlled by the war-torn country’s government to elect a new parliament amid strict fitness measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
The vote is the third to be in Syria since the confrontation began in March 2011. It has killed more than 400,000 people, discarded part of the country’s population and taken more than five million refugees, mainly in neighbouring countries.
This year’s vote follows a new wave of U.S. sanctions that came into force last month and an anti-corruption crusade in which a wealthy cousin of President Bashar Assad was forced to pay tens of millions of dollars to the state.
The elections coincide with Syria’s worst economic crisis and a fall in the currency, which has left a greater part of the county’s population in poverty.
Some 1,656 government-approved candidates run for the 250-seat People’s Assembly this year. The total number of eligible voters has been announced.
As in last elections in Syria, the vote will produce an unwavering official voting framework for the president.
No votes were held in the northwestern province of Idlib, Syria’s last stronghold, or in the northeast of the country, controlled by U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters.
Voting in government-controlled spaces took place without primary incidents, but in the rebel-held north, a car bomb killed five other people on Sunday night and injured dozens near a border crossing with Turkey, according to Syrian opposition activists and Turkish officials. news agency.
Within polling stations, all staff wore masks and gloves and the electorate had to use their own pens in the sanitized voting booths. Once their votes were cast, they had to leave immediately, as no meetings were allowed inside. People also had to stay at a distance while they waited their turn.
Assad and his wife Asma, masked, voted Sunday morning in Damascus at the Ministry of Presidential Affairs.
Information Minister Imad Sarah said the vote “underlines the team spirit of the Syrian homeland, which after nine years of war, Syria will kneel,” in statements to reporters after the vote.
[Subscribe to our Health IQ newsletter for coronavirus updates]
Assad has twice postponed the country’s parliamentary elections this year due to in-position restrictions to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Assad himself is running for office.
Syria, which had a population before the war of 22 million, reported 496 cases of coronavirus and 25 deaths. However, the actual figures are much higher and increases have been reported in recent days.
The last Syrian parliament was elected in April 2016, when giant portions of Syria were out of government and others did not take part in the vote. Since then, Assad’s forces have captured much of Syria with the help of their allies, Russia and Iran.
The head of the Higher Judicial Elections Commission, Judge Samer Zumriq, showed this Saturday in a statement to the official news firm SANA that more than 7,400 polling stations have been set up in 15 constituencies. They come with 1,400 seats where infantry soldiers and members of the country’s security facilities will vote.
Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. (04:00 GMT) and were expected to close 12 hours later. It lasted from 4 hours to 10 p.m. (1900 GMT) due to the increased participation.
The effects are expected to be announced the next day.
Some 167 seats are assigned to Assad’s ruling Baath Arab Socialist Party, which promises it a forged majority, while the rest is allocated to independents, adding traders, entrepreneurs and industrialists.
“We hope that the members of the new council will adapt to the living situations of citizens by enacting new legislation,” said Samir Sulaiman, a 50-year-old employee.
This year’s vote comes at a time when the country is also experiencing difficult economic conditions, adding to a collapse of the local currency annoyed by US sanctions and an economic crisis in neighboring Lebanon.
The so-called Caesar Act on the Protection of Civilians in Syria provides for sanctions against Syrian troops and other perpetrators of atrocities committed in Syria’s civil war, and also provides investments for investigations and prosecutions for war crimes.
Syria calls for acts of sanctions “economic terrorism.”
Outgoing lawmaker Mohannad Haj Ali, who is subject to U.S. and European sanctions, said the country faces a “suffocating economic and political seat.” He also said that Syrian citizens were aware of corruption within state institutions, adding that Assad had begun to “fight corruption by tracking down the corrupt.”
Haj Ali gave no names, however, his comments came after Assad’s maternal cousin, Rami Makhlouf, who once considered him a central component of the Syrian economy, pleaded with Assad to help save him from the ruin of his business.
The editor of the Associated Press, Bassem Mroue, contributed to the from Beirut.