I spoke with Monocle 24’s The Globalist on Tuesday morning about today’s re-election of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.
The discussion, which included Monocle’s Rebecca Collard in Beirut, started with the question, “Does this election have any value?”
Listen to discussion from 13:57 on The Globalist homepage or in a separate pop-out window
The election because it is being used by the regime to demonstrate its supposed legitimacy. It wants to demonstrate legitimacy amongst those Syrians who do support President Assad, and they want to show some kind of legitimacy outside Syria and claim that the opposition are merely “terrorists”.
It’s a PR exercise.
