No quotas: How can new Syrian government be inclusive?

"One, one, one! The Syrian people are one!" Ever since anti-government protests began in Syria over a decade ago, this has been one of the most popular chants during demonstrations.

But at the same time, the popular refrain doesn't really reflect Syria's everyday reality. Before Syria's civil war began, about 68% of Syrians were Sunni Muslim Arabs. A further 9% to 13% are members of the Alawite ethnoreligious group and somewhere between 8% and 10% are of Kurdish ethnicity. Then there are also Druze, Christian, Armenian, Circassian, Turkmen, Palestinian and Yazidi locals. 

While the Assad family were in charge, they exploited divisions between Syria's different groups to maintain control. But since the authoritarian regime was toppled in December, the European Union and others have insisted that for them to lift sanctions, all communities in Syria must be able to play a part in the new government.

'Sigificant gaps'

Late last week, Syria's interim government released a first, temporary version of the country's new constitution. In this, constitutional experts pointed out, there is no mention of Syria's minorities. Locals also complained about a lack of representation at the recent National Dialogue event. 

Additionally as the Karam Shaar Advisory, a consultancy specializing in the Syrian economy, pointed out, the caretaker government is still overwhelmingly linked to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the rebel group that led the offensive that ousted Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in early December last year. Categorizing 21 cabinet ministers and 154 senior appointees appointed between December and late February this year, researchers noted that the majority were male and Sunni Muslim.

This "can in part be excused due to the extraordinary circumstances under which the appointments were made," the Advisory wrote but added that if it continued, that would be problematic.

How to ensure representation

Syrians themselves don't seem to think a quota system will work.

"We have minority groups, and this is our reality," says Alaa Sindian, 32, a Shiite Muslim who fled Syria during the war after being pursued by the Assad government but who recently returned to Damascus. "But at the same time, I personally don't want to see seats in parliament reserved for Shiites, Alawites or any other sect," she told DW. "The government should be looking for qualified individuals from within minorities."

At the same time, Sindian also thinks there should be different forums in which Syrian minorities can be heard and empowered.

"I am against sectarian quotas, whether in government or otherwise," adds Shadi al-Dubisi, 29, a Druze civil society activist. "I support the idea of a technocratic government, where individuals are viewed based on competence and ability, rather than their sectarian, religious or ethnic affiliations," he told DW.

This isn't an unusual attitude. During focus groups held in mid-2024 by Swisspeace, a Basel-based institute that researches peacebuilding, Syrian participants said they didn't want a quota system, because of how they'd seen these play out in Iraq and Lebanon.

"In meetings with the international community, there is often a focus on the protection of minorities," adds Anna Myriam Roccatello, deputy executive director at the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice or ICTJ. "But a lot of Syrians I've worked with, both in government and civil society, are more resistant to this focus. Lebanon is very prominent in their minds and the partition of branches of government there is something they absolutely abhor," Roccatello noted.

What's wrong in Iraq and Lebanon?

In Lebanon, the Taif Agreement of 1989 ended that country's civil war and allocated how the country's different sects, who had been fighting, should be represented in government. 

In Iraq, after the 2003 US invasion and the end of dictatorship there, American authorities decided that power must be split between the country's three main demographic groups.

In political science, these systems are known as "confessional" or "consociational."

"The idea behind confessionalism is to give each ethnic and religious group a voice in government in order to ensure that their needs are covered," researcher Nour Mohsen wrote in a 2021 paper for the journal, "Flux: International Relations Review." "However, it is ultimately an unsuccessful system to manage ethnic and religious pluralism," she argued, "because it leads to sectarianism, which leads to instability due to the corruption."

While confessional systems have ended conflict, they have led to problems in the longer term, including incompetent leadership or different groups competing for privileges. They also mean religious or sectarian priorities are always part of politics even if local voters no longer want that.

It also opens the door to foreign interference, Mohsen argued. "The stronger allegiance to a sect rather than to a nation has made each ethnic or religious political group reach out to similar groups in other nations for support."

What should Syria do?

Unfortunately there's no easy formula for ensuring that everyone gets a say in post-conflict governments.

For every possible strategy that promotes better representation for minorities, there are counter arguments.

For example, federalism is another option, a system that some of the largest and most complex democracies in the world use, including Germany, the US and Russia. A federal system has two levels of government: One operates at national level and the other is at a sub-national, or state, level. The former is often in charge of things like national defense and foreign policy while the latter makes decisions at a more local level but can also impact the national government.

However even this sort of system depends on circumstances and can be "employed to mask domination by some ethnic communities over others," John McGarry, a political studies professor at Queen's University in Ontario, Canda, wrote in a 2024 paper. He points to how apartheid South Africa established "independent homelands" for different African communities while in reality, the white minority still ruled.

It always depends on the vagaries of each different situation, says Sahar Ammar, a program officer with Swisspeace and lead researcher on the organization's Syrian power sharing project.

"The government should be inclusive but this needs to be supported by bottom-up processes on the local level to foster a culture of dialogue and rebuild trust," she argues, noting this would be a natural continuation of recent Syrian civil society efforts. 

All this also takes time, says ICTJ's Roccatello.

"As much as it causes the international system anxiety, we need to give the Syrians the space to carve out their own solution," she told DW. "Fundamental rights, including the rights of minorities, certainly should be used as a parameter … but at this point in time, we are not even in a situation where we can reliably assess the willingness of the current government to do that because they are still facing a lack of control and security in large part of the country."

Edited by: Matt Pearson