Posted by Scott Lucas | Feb 25, 2021 |
Bashar al-Assad addresses Syria’s Parliament, March 2016 (AFP)
Under the guise of Parliamentary elections, the Assad regime has used the Ba’ath Party to tighten its rule over Syria.
The Ba’ath Party was founded in 1947 as an Arab socialist movement. It was part of a ruling coalition after a military coup in 1963, but the party’s original leaders were pushed aside three years later in another coup.
Enter Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in 1970 and imprisoned the Ba’ath leadership. The party then became a “patronage network” of the regime, “restructured so as to fit into the authoritarian format of Assad’s system, lose its avant-garde character and became an instrument for generating mass support and political control”.