For the 4th time, Bashar al-Assad sworn in today as the President of Syria. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been sworn in for a seven-year term in the war-torn country, after winning more than 95.1 percent of the votes cast in government-held areas.
The May 26 elections were described by al-Assad’s opponents and Western countries as illegitimate and a sham.
Saturday’s swearing-in ceremony was held at the presidential palace in Damascus and attended by more than 600 people, including clergymen, members of parliament, political figures and army officers.
The elections “have proven the strength of popular legitimacy that the people have conferred to the state”, al-Assad, 55, said in his inauguration speech. They “have discredited the declarations of Western officials on the legitimacy of the state, the constitution and the homeland”, he added.
Al-Assad took over in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez, who had seized power in 1970 in a bloodless military coup. His re-election in a landslide was never in doubt. Al-Assad garnered 95.1 percent of the vote in the election, in which officials said turnout was 78.6 percent of some 18 million registered voters. There were no independent monitors of the one-day vote.
The competition was symbolic, with two little-known candidates running against al-Assad. In the previous polls in 2014, he had won nearly 89 percent of the vote. His new term starts with the country still devastated by 10 years of war that killed hundreds of thousands and sliding deeper into a worsening economic crisis.
