Syria Election: Vote The Right Way — Or Else
Tuesday May 6, 2014
It's a parody of democracy. It will damage the political process and hinder the prospects for peace. This is how Western leaders — their regional allies and also UN bigwigs — have dismissed the presidential elections in Syria set for June 3.
It seems that despite having a choice of several candidates, the Syrian people having an election to decide for themselves who should be their country's president is a very bad thing. In the name of 'democracy', elections in Syria should only happen after the current government has been forcibly removed from power. 'Assad must go', even if it could well be the case that the majority of Syrians don't want him to go.
The Western elite's dismissive response to these elections tells us everything we need to know about their commitment to “democracy”.
The truth is that the emergence of a multi-party democracy in Syria enabled by the country's 2012 constitution, which ended the decades’ long monopoly on power by the Ba'ath Party, is the very last thing the US and its allies want; they know that the Baathists and President Assad have too much popular support in the country. By continually repeating “Assad must go” before any new presidential elections are held, these “democrats” are effectively disenfranchising a large chunk of Syrian society – the people who do support their government. We should not be surprised at this as these Western “democrats” routinely seek to disenfranchise those who have the “wrong” views.
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