Syrian President Bashar Assad has been reelected to a fourth term as president of war-ravaged Syria with over 95% of the votes cast, results showed on Thursday. Munia Iffat reports.
Bashar Assad wins re-election for the fourth term and defeating two challengers, including a former senior official of a rebel coalition, Syrian authorities have announced.
According to Hammouda Sabbagh, turnout in Wednesday’s election was 78%, with Assad winning over 13 million votes.
Mahmoud Ahmad Marei, who previously served as the secretary-general of the rebel coalition National Front for the Liberation of Syria, received some 470,276 votes, or 3.1%, while Abdullah Sallum Abdullah of the Socialist Unionist Party came in third with about 213,968 votes or 1.5%.
The controversial vote extending Assad’s stranglehold on power was the second since the start of a decade-long civil conflict that has killed more than 388,000 people, displaced millions, and battered the country’s infrastructure.
On the eve of the election, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy said the poll was “neither free nor fair”, and Syria’s fragmented opposition has called it a “farce”.
But few believed that the 55-year-old Assad, an ophthalmologist by training, would be re-elected. In the last multi-candidate poll in 2014, Assad won 88 percent of the vote.
