DAMASCUS: Bashar Al-Assad has been re-elected for a fourth term as president of war-ravaged Syria, official results showed, despite Western accusations the polls were “neither free nor fair”.
The controversial vote extending Assad’s stranglehold on power was the second since the start of a decade-long civil conflict that has killed more than 388,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country’s infrastructure.
The parliamentary speaker announced on Thursday that Assad garnered 95.1 percent of the votes cast, trouncing two virtually unknown challengers.
Standing against him were former state minister Abdallah Salloum Abdallah and Mahmud Merhi, a member of the so-called “tolerated opposition”, long dismissed by exiled opposition leaders as an extension of the regime.
On the eve of the election, the US, Britain, France, Germany and Italy said the poll was “neither free nor fair”, and Syria’s fragmented opposition has called it a “farce”.
There was no doubt that Assad, a 55-year-old ophthalmologist by training, would be re-elected. In the last multi-candidate poll in 2014, Assad won 88 percent of the vote.
Huge election posters glorifying Assad had mushroomed across two-thirds of the country under his control in the lead-up to Wednesday’s poll.
Before the election results were announced, tens of thousands of Syrians gathered in various cities to celebrate, waving Syrian flags and carrying pictures of Assad.
The festivities broke out after the election committee said that “the ballot counting process has been completed in the majority of Syrian provinces”.
Thousands of other Syrians rallied in the coastal city of Latakia and in Umayyad Square in the capital Damascus, which along with Tartus and Latakia are bastions of the regime. Celebrations were also underway in Aleppo and in Sweida, where a crowd gathered in front of city hall.
The election was held Wednesday in government-held areas, and state media showed long queues forming outside polling stations, which remained open five hours past the planned closing time.
The vote took place amid the lowest levels of violence since the war erupted in 2011 — but with the economy in free fall. More than 80 percent of the population live in poverty, and the Syrian pound has plunged in value against the dollar, causing skyrocketing inflation.
Assad’s campaign slogan, “Hope through work”, evoked the colossal reconstruction needed to rebuild the country, requiring billions of dollars in funding. Assad was first elected by referendum in 2000 after the death of his father Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria for 30 years.
The UN’s Syria envoy, Geir Pedersen, said the polls were held under the auspices of the current constitution and “not part of the political (transition) process called for in Security Council Resolution 2254” of December 2015.
“What is required is a Syrian-led and -owned political solution, facilitated by the United Nations and backed by constructive international diplomacy,” he said.
In rebel-held northwestern Syria, hundreds took to the streets to protest and carried posters saying: “No legitimacy for Assad and his elections.”
