Syria is about to have a working parliament for the first time since Bashar al-Assad fell.
Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa signed a decree this week naming the final 70 members of the 210-seat People's Assembly, the last step before the chamber holds its first session on Monday, 6 July. Members will be sworn in, elect a presiding board, and set up a committee to write the assembly's rules. Under the transitional charter the body sits for 30 months, a term that can be extended.
The assembly was built in two parts. Last October, regional electoral colleges chose two-thirds of the seats across 11 of Syria's provinces, and the president fills the remaining third by appointment. Sharaa used those 70 slots to reshape the chamber. Of them, 15 are women and 13 spent time in Assad's prisons. By Anadolu Ajansı's count, 23 are prominent public figures and 47 are experts and academics, among them 17 with doctorates. Aleppo drew the largest share with 14 seats, followed by Hassakeh, Homs and Deir ez-Zor.
The appointments were also a correction. When the electoral colleges voted, only six seats went to women and 10 to minority candidates, and officials said the president would use his share to close the gap.
The map of the vote tells its own story. Raqqa and Hassakeh went to the polls only after long delays, once government forces took those areas from the YPG/SDF, the PKK's Syrian affiliate, earlier this year. In Suweida, the Druze-majority province in the south, the vote has not been held at all. The province has stayed outside state control since sectarian fighting there killed some 1,700 people last summer, and the electoral committee says polls will follow "when conditions become suitable."
The United Nations is watching the opening with measured hope. Its deputy special envoy, Claudio Cordone, told the Security Council last week that Syria's transition was "at a critical phase, with opportunity and fragility existing side-by-side," and that the country "needs the People's Assembly to begin its work." He reported progress on the ceasefire between the government and the SDF, with four SDF brigades folded into the national army and drawing state salaries and 1,300 detainees released, and he pressed for every part of Syrian society to feel represented in the new chamber.
For Türkiye, the arithmetic in Damascus is close to home. Ankara was among the first governments to back the new Syrian state after Assad's fall, and its interests run through the same questions the assembly now inherits. It wants a Syria that holds together as one country, a border quiet enough for the millions of Syrians sheltering in Türkiye to start going home, and a reconstruction economy that Turkish firms are positioned to help build. A functioning legislature, even an imperfect one, is the institution that turns a transition into a government. The folding of SDF units into the national army points the same way Ankara has long argued Syria should go, toward one army and one state rather than an autonomous zone on its southern border.
The first test comes Monday, when 210 members, elected in parts, appointed in parts, and drawn from a country still stitching itself back together, take their seats and begin to legislate.