Assadism

Assadism is a far-left variant of the neo-Ba'athist ideology based on the policies and thinking of the Assad family, which governed Syria as a 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.
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.
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.
Hafez al-Assad's reign was marked by the virtual abandonment of Pan-Arab ideology; replacing it with the doctrine of socialist transformation and giving overriding priority in constructing socialist society within Syria. Political participation was limited to the National Progressive Front, the ruling coalition of Syrian Baath 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.
The degree of militarization of Assadist Syria was indecently high. Syria's air force and tank fleets were not much smaller (if not larger) than those of large European countries. In 1979, Syria was one of the four largest arms importers in the world (between 1961 and 1979, it imported weapons worth $7.4 billion, one of the highest figures).
The Assadist regime was characterized by a very large-scale militarization of the entire Syrian society (both men and women, as can be seen from the military parades held in Syria) and a highly militaristic propaganda in the media and education system, mixed with the personality cult of Hafez al-Assad (and later Bashar). Even if a person has not yet served in the army and is a student, he will eventually receive some military training, such as assembling weapons, in a schools, run by Assadist youth organizations (such as the Revolutionary Youth Union), membership in which was mandatory. Organizations like the RYU also carried out intensive ideological training and spread of Assadist ideas in schools, helping to create "ideologically correct" youth. School students also were taught Ba'athism and Assadism through a course known as "Political Arab Sociology". According to the Constitution of Syria of 1973, Chapter 3: Educational and Cultural Principles, Article 21, it is written:
Assadist propaganda outside of schools was also very strong and all-encompassing. In fact, the personality cult and ideas of Hafez al-Assad were everywhere: in society, in schools, in the media, in public places and most other places in Syria.
Bitterness towards the Assadist regime and the Alawite elite in the neo-Ba'ath and armed forces became widespread amongst the Sunni majority, laying the beginnings of an Islamic resistance. Prominent leaders of Muslim Brotherhood like Issam al-Attar were imprisoned and exiled. A coalition of the traditional Syrian Sunni ulema, Muslim Brotherhood revolutionaries and Islamist activists formed the Syrian Islamic Front in 1980 with objective of overthrowing Assad through Jihad and establishing an Islamic state. In the same year, Hafez officially supported Iran in its war with Iraq and controversially began importing Iranian fighters and terror groups into Lebanon and Syria. This led to rising social tensions within the country which eventually became a full-fledged Islamist rebellion in 1982; led by the Islamic Front. The regime responded by slaughtering the Sunni inhabitants in Hama and Aleppo and bombarding numerous mosques, killing around 20,000–40,000 civilians. The uprising was brutally crushed and the Muslim Brotherhood armed movement was demolished.