Assadism

Assadism (Arabic: اسدية, romanized: ʾAsadiyah) or Assadist Ba'athism is a left-wing ideology and a variant of neo-Ba'athism based on the policies and thinking of the Assad family, which governed Syria as a totalitarian hereditary dictatorship from 1971 to 2024. Assadism was characterized by Arab nationalism, socialism, totalitarianism, extreme militarism, and a cult of personality around the Assad family. This period spanned the successive regimes of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad. The Assads rose to power as a result of the 1970 Syrian coup d'état, leading to the consolidation of Alawite minority dominance within the military and security forces. Their governance was largely characterized by nepotism, sectarianism, and ethnic favoritism. The ideology enshrines the Assad family's leadership role in Syrian politics and presented the Assad regime in a very personalist fashion, creating a government based upon and revolving around its leader. Under this system, the Syrian Ba'ath Party portrayed the wisdom of Assad as "beyond the comprehension of the average citizen." Syrian state propaganda cast Assadism as a neo-Ba'athist current that evolved Ba'athist ideology with the needs of the modern era.

The Assad family cultivated extensive patronage networks, securing loyalty while monopolizing vast portions of the Syrian economy and fostering widespread corruption. The Syrian Ba'ath party used its control over Syria's political, social, economic, cultural, educational and religious spheres to enforce its neo-Ba'athist ideology in the wider society and preserve the Assad family's grip on power. Hafez al-Assad's goal upon coming to power was to consolidate the socialist state with the Ba'ath party as its vanguard by establishing a "coup-proof" system that eliminated factional rivalries. As soon as he seized power, the armed forces, secret police, security forces, and bureaucracy were purged, subjugating them to party command by installing Alawite elites loyal to Assad. To maintain control, although Assadism initially attempted to solve problems within the country through political maneuvering in 1970s, by the early 1980s the regime had shifted toward the use of brute force and relentless oppression, exemplified by the Hama massacre in 1982 and the several sectarian massacres over the course of the Syrian civil war since 2011. Following the fall of the Assad regime in 2024 as a result of a Syrian opposition offensive amid the civil war, Assadists loyal to the former regime have engaged in an insurgency across Alawite strongholds in western Syria.

Prior to Hafez al-Assad's seizure of power in 1970, the neo-Ba'athist movement in Syria had been dominated by strongman Salah Jadid, who came to power after a successful coup in 1966.

Salah Jadid pursued a very radical Marxist–Leninist policy internally, and aggressive and interventionist externally. In the end, his uncompromising radicalism and brutal imposition of his ideas alienated almost all layers of Syrian society, as well as members of the ruling party, who believed that the situation required a more moderate approach: The latter united around Hafez al-Assad, who was opposed to Jadid's adventurism.

Tensions between Jadid and Assad increased following the Six-Day War in 1967 and invasion of Jordan in 1970. The conflict was not limited to heated debates at party meetings and congresses, sometimes escalating into military clashes between supporters of both parties (in particular between pro-Assad elements in the army and the Palestinian fedayeen group as-Sa'iqa, which supported the Jadid regime), especially in 1969. Hafez al-Assad took advantage of his control over the military to dismantle Jadid's support network, before carrying out a coup and imprisoning Jadid and then Syrian president Nureddin al-Atassi.

After Assad seized power, the ideology of neo-Ba'athism transformed into Assadism, with even greater nationalism, militarism and the now established cult of personality of the Assad family. Assadism is very different from the ideas propagated by the original leaders of the Ba'athist movement, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, which caused them great dissatisfaction with such an ideological transformation. Assad set upon a project of rapid institution-building, reopened parliament and adopted a permanent constitution for the country, which had been ruled by military fiat and a provisional constitutional documents since 1963.

Political participation was limited to the National Progressive Front, the ruling coalition of Syrian Ba'ath and Marxist–Leninist parties; entrenching itself firmly within the Soviet Bloc. The Party also began building a personality cult around Assad and brought the elite of the armed forces under Assad's grip and the officer corps were installed with Alawite loyalists, further alienating the Sunni majority from the party.

The Ba'athists initially pursued a very militaristic policy aimed at some kind of "mobilization of the nation to fight against the Israeli enemy." But under Assad, militarism reached new heights. Following the Syrian loss during the Six-Day War with Israel, Hafez initiated a huge expansion of the military to achieve military parity with Israel. Assad gave a high priority to building a strong military and preparing it for a confrontation with Israel, both for offensive and defensive purposes and to enable him to politically negotiate the return of the Golan Heights from a position of military strength. He allocated up to 70 percent of the annual budget to the military build-up and received large quantities of modern arms from the Soviet Union. The Syrian Arab Army, which was mainly a conscripted force, increased from 50,000 personnel in 1967 to 225,000 in 1973, and to over 350,000 by the 1990s.