Can Syria’s president survive the Arab Spring?

last updated 8 January 2015

It seemed for a while as if the Arab Spring would pass Syria by, but now that country, too, is seeing serious upheavals, said Beate Seel in Berlin’s Die Tageszeitung. Street protests started in mid-March in the southern border town of Daraa, sparked by the arrest of 15 youths for painting anti-government slogans. Protesters keep massing in the streets, and the government has killed more than 100 people. It’s by far the biggest crisis President Bashar al-Assad has faced since he succeeded his father, Hafez, 11 years ago. He might have expected trouble in Hama or Aleppo, where the banned Muslim Brotherhood has many supporters, but Daraa is a highly conservative, ordinary town. If open defiance happens there, it can happen anywhere.

You’d think that by now Arab leaders would realize violent repression just makes things worse, said Bassel Oudat in Cairo’s Al-Ahram. When a handful of protesters were killed, 20,000 people turned out for the funerals and even more lives were lost. And despite Assad’s warning last week that he would not tolerate “chaos,” there’s still no sign of the demonstrators backing down. They’ve been calling for democracy, but their grievances are mainly economic. The southern agricultural region has been devastated by drought, and Syrians everywhere are suffering the effects of bad economic management. Youth unemployment is a major problem: In the cities, young men with advanced degrees are reduced to driving taxis. Syrians have also had enough of corruption in high places, and are particularly enraged by Assad’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, a tycoon who is known to pocket huge kickbacks.

Assad has had to play it tough, said Paris’s Le Monde. His Alawi sect makes up only 12 percent of the population of 22 million, and although his regime has been good to the majority Sunnis, Assad can’t be sure they won’t desert him if things get out of hand. But he has also made some conciliatory gestures—releasing the graffiti writers, sacking Daraa’s loathed governor, forcing his entire cabinet to resign. It just might work. Syrians know the lengths to which Assad might go if they spit on his concessions. In 1982, his father dispatched crack army units to quell an Islamist uprising in Hama; tens of thousands were massacred, and much of the city was razed by bombs and artillery. Assad’s fall would be a boon for more than just the Syrians, said Steven Cook in CouncilonForeignRelations.org. It might end Syria’s close alliance with Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and its uncompromising hostility to Israel. A “decent” new government could seriously improve the prospects for regional peace.