Elections in Syria: Not Looking So Hot

One nice thing about about democracy in America is that for the most part we are spared having to look at our politicians, unless we have a taste for the absurd and the evening news. Folks in the Middle East aren't so lucky. Around election season in any given city, the streets become filled with posters and banners that carry the portraits of contenders for public offices high and low. The results are not always inspiring.

In part, these would-be glamor shots seem to fit into the clannish, small town feel of urban life in the Middle East, where even though everyone doesn't really know everyone else in their neighborhood, they like to pretend they do. But perhaps it's also an expression of the political realty of the region. Despite the trappings of democracy and constitutional governance, countries in the Middle East are still ruled by men not by laws. Power here is personal.

So even though Syria is holding parliamentary elections next Sunday, the results are nearly foreordained. A majority of seats are reserved for a coalition led by the ruling Ba'ath party. The remaining seats are being fought over by two political lists (temporary line-ups of allied candidates) created by government string-pulling. The parliament itself is is just a rubber stamp anyway. Real power lies with a small group of high officials tied to the family of President Bashar Al Assad, who won a referendum -- a kind of single candidate election -- in 2000 with an official vote of 97 percent.

Which begs the question: Why in such a closed system is the country still gripped with a limited kind of election fever? Why is Damascus covered in campaign posters? Why couldn't a wealthy business man like the one pictured below just pay a few bribes and enter parliament without having to make soft-focus blue-tinted posters of himself looking like he just stepped out of an ABBA video? And why does President Assad have his picture on every government building?

It's as if the whole system of dominance in these oligarchic countries still relies on people feeling as if they have a personal, organic connection to their leaders. And in some ways, leaders in the Middle East can be more accessible than those in the West. Many still hold diwaniyahs -- open receptions where supplicants ask for favors and supporters pledge their fealty.

Of course, all of the supposed intimacy between rulers and ruled is a game of smoke and mirrors, a mass-mediated political drama, just like all those televised town hall meetings on an American campaign trail. The difference is that when we tire of our leaders, we can send them packing, turn off the television, or tune out the news. But in a Middle Eastern security state, you may tire of watching your leaders, but your leaders never tire of watching you.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus