°®Âþµº

Syria's ruling Baath party won an expected majority in parliamentary elections this week, results showed Thursday, with participation under 40 percent at the fourth such poll since civil war erupted in 2011.

The exiled opposition had criticised the vote as illegitimate, with the election going ahead on Monday without the participation of Syrians living abroad or outside government-held areas.

Regime leader Bashar al-Assad's Baath party - in power since 1963 - and its secular left-wing and Arab nationalist allies were running virtually unopposed for the 250 seats.

Jihad Murad, head of Syria's Supreme Judicial Elections Committee, read out the winners' names at a press conference on Thursday, without specifying which party had prevailed.

Comparing the names with the candidates' list showed the Baath party and its allies took 185 seats - 169 won by the party alone.

The remaining 65 seats were won by candidates presented as "independents" but mostly running on Baath lists.

Murad said participation was 38.16 percent, with official records showing more than seven million people cast ballots out of 19 million eligible voters.

Participation was up from 33 percent at the last parliamentary poll in 2020, when the Baath party and allied candidates won 177 seats, but down from 57 percent participation in 2016.

Syrians living in areas held by Ankara-backed rebels in the country's north, as well as in the Kurdish-controlled northeast and the jihadist-run Idlib bastion in the northwest, were effectively disenfranchised.

Candidates were still running in those regions, but only Syrians living in government-held areas could vote at designated polling booths.

Millions of Syrians living abroad, many of them refugees, also had no vote.

Voting was calm in most areas, but a war monitor and a local media outlet reported anti-election protests in the southern Suweida province, the heartland of Syria's Druze minority, which has seen regular anti-government demonstrations for almost a year.

Senior opposition figure in exile Hadi Albahra said this week on X that an election taking place "in a limited geographical area" and that did not "include all Syrians who have the right to participate" was "not free, fair or legitimate".

Bader Jamous, head of the exiled opposition Syrian Negotiations Commission, said the new parliament was "deprived of will".

In its first session, lawmakers will elect a speaker and the government will move into a caretaker role until Assad appoints a new prime minister tasked with forming a cabinet.

Syria's war began after the brutal repression of anti-government protests in 2011 and has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.

United Nations-backed attempts to reach a political settlement have repeatedly failed, and talks since 2019 on revising Syria's constitution have also stalled.