Originally published 2021-05-28.
Syria's authorities declared Bashar al-Assad the winner of the presidential election of 26 May 2021 with 95.19% of the vote, giving him a fourth seven-year term. The official turnout was 78.64%. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy said the vote was neither free nor fair, and the United Nations said it had no mandate for it. Assad's rule did not last the term: his government fell in December 2024, and he fled to Moscow.
This page explains the official figures, who was allowed to run and vote, why the result was disputed, and how the election fits into the end of the Assad era.
The official result
The results were announced on 27 May 2021 by the speaker of Syria's parliament. According to the official count:
- Bashar al-Assad: 13,540,860 votes (95.19%)
- Mahmoud Ahmad Marei: 470,276 votes (3.31%), a figure from a small, officially tolerated opposition bloc and former head of the National Front for the Liberation of Syria
- Abdullah Sallum Abdullah: 213,968 votes (1.50%), from the Socialist Unionist Party, a member of the ruling National Progressive Front
- Invalid or blank ballots: 14,036
Officials said 18.1 million Syrians were registered to vote. Some early reports gave Marei's share as about 3.1%; the final official figure was 3.31%. Assad thanked voters in a statement and called on Syrians to begin work the next day on rebuilding the country and giving its young people hope. He was sworn in on 17 July 2021 at the presidential palace in Damascus.
Who was allowed to run
Under Syria's 2012 constitution and electoral law, candidates applied to the Supreme Constitutional Court. Applications were open from 19 to 28 April 2021, and on 3 May the court approved just three names. The rules kept the field narrow:
- each candidate needed written backing from 35 members of parliament, a chamber dominated by Assad's Ba'ath Party and its allies;
- candidates had to have lived in Syria continuously for the previous ten years, which ruled out almost every exiled opposition figure;
- they had to be at least 40, Syrian by birth and Muslim.
In practice, no candidate could reach the ballot without the approval of the parliament Assad's allies controlled. Neither challenger campaigned as a serious rival, and both were widely seen as there to give the vote the look of a contest.
Where Syrians could and could not vote
After ten years of war, Syria in 2021 was divided. The election took place only in government-held areas. There was no vote in the opposition-held north-west, around Idlib, or in the Kurdish-led autonomous region of the north-east, apart from ballot boxes in government-held pockets of Hasakah and Qamishli. There were protests in Daraa and Suwayda in the south, and some polling stations in Daraa reportedly stayed shut.
Millions of Syrians lived abroad as refugees. Some embassies opened polling stations from 20 May, but several countries did not allow voting. Voters also needed a valid passport with an official exit stamp, which excluded many who had fled across borders without one. In Lebanon, about 50,000 of an estimated 1.2 million Syrians voted, amid reports of crowd trouble and attacks on voters. In Jordan, only a few hundred of around 1.3 million did.
The turnout figures were questioned. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that only about five million people actually voted and argued that the official count was larger than the adult population living in government areas.
Why Western governments and the UN rejected it
Before the vote, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US issued a joint statement saying the election would be neither free nor fair. They said it was being held outside the framework of UN Security Council Resolution 2254.
That resolution, passed unanimously in December 2015, set out a path for ending the war: a political transition, a new constitution, and then free elections under UN supervision, open to all Syrians including those abroad. Because no new constitution had been agreed, critics said the 2021 vote skipped the process the Security Council itself had endorsed. The UN said it had no mandate for the election and that it was not part of the peace process. The European Union said the vote met none of the conditions for a genuinely democratic election.
The US said it would not recognise the result unless the vote was free, fair, supervised by the UN and inclusive of all Syrians.
The government's case and its allies
Damascus argued that the election followed the Syrian constitution and that foreign governments had no right to judge it. Russia, Assad's main military backer, called the result a decisive victory and a sovereign matter for Syria, and Russian and Iranian representatives were among those invited to observe.
Supporters of the government also made two points worth noting. First, several Western and Gulf countries closed their embassies in Damascus after 2011, which made voting abroad harder in some places. Second, some of the same governments that condemned the vote had backed armed opposition groups during the war. Both points are broadly accurate, but neither changes the basic problem: much of the population could not vote, and the candidate rules gave the ruling party a veto.
How it compared with earlier votes
Assad first came to power in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled since 1970. In 2000 and 2007 he was confirmed in referendums with no other candidate, winning 97.29% and 97.6%. In 2014, in the first election with more than one name on the ballot, he took 88.7%. That vote, also held only in government areas, was ranked the worst election in the world that year by the academic Electoral Integrity Project.
Very high scores are common in elections where opposition is restricted. They tell us more about how a vote is organised than about genuine public support, which is why the official figures are best reported with clear attribution.
What happened next
Assad's fourth term was meant to run until 2028. It ended much sooner. In late 2024 opposition forces, led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham with other armed groups, launched a rapid offensive. They took Aleppo and then Homs, and government defences around Damascus collapsed. On 8 December 2024 Assad left the country for Moscow, where Russia granted him and his family asylum, ending more than 50 years of rule by the Assad family.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the HTS leader, became Syria's de facto leader and was named president for a transitional period on 29 January 2025. Looking back, the 2021 vote is a useful case study: a near-unanimous official result can sit alongside a government that lacks the strength or support to survive a serious challenge.
Sources: Wikipedia: 2021 Syrian presidential election; Wikipedia: Fall of the Assad regime; original news report via RT.
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