# Assadism

* This article is part of a series aboutHafez al-Assad
Early life
Family
President of Syria
Secretary-General of the Syrian Ba'ath Party (1970–2000)
General, Syrian Armed Forces (1952–2000)
Premiership
Hafez al-Assad Government
Presidency
Corrective Movement
Islamist uprising (1982 Hama massacre)
Yom Kippur War
Syrian occupation of Lebanon
Arab–Israeli conflict
Elections
1971
1978
1985
1991
1999 :
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* This article is part of a series aboutBashar al-Assad
Personal
Early life
Family
Personal life
Presidency
Foreign policy
Presidential trips
Occupation of Lebanon
Cedar Revolution
Damascus Spring
Damascus Declaration
Operation Outside the Box
Syrian civil war
Arab Spring
Syrian revolution
Arab–Israeli conflict
War against ISIS
COVID-19 pandemic
Regime fall
Fall of Damascus (2024)
Proposed handover to Syria
Governments
Mero I
Mero II
Al-Otari
Safar
Hijab
Al-Halqi I
Al-Halqi II
Khamis
Arnous I
Arnous II
Jalali
Elections
2000
2007
2014
2021 :
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Assadism is a neo-Ba'athist ideology based on the policies and thinking of the Assad family, which governed Syria as a totalitarian hereditary dictatorship from 1971 to 2024. 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 due to a renewed Syrian opposition offensive amid the civil war, Assadists loyal to the former regime have engaged in a violent insurgency across Alawite strongholds in western Syria.
Jamal al-Atassi, co-founder of Zaki al-Arsuzi's early Arab Ba'ath Party and later Syrian dissident, stated that "Assadism is a false nationalism. It's the domination of a minority, and I'm not talking just of the Alawites, who control the society's nervous system. I include also the army and the mukhabarat... And despite its socialist slogans, the state is run by a class who has made a fortune without contributing—a nouvelle bourgeoisie parasitaire." The Assad family aligned itself with Iran and its Axis of Resistance for much of its rule, contributing to an inter-Ba'athist rivalry with the Sunni-dominated Saddamist Ba'ath Party in Iraq.

## History
### Pre-1970

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. Tensions between Jadid and Assad increased following the Six-Day War in 1967 and invasion of Jordan in 1970. 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.