A source in the Syrian presidential palace cooperating with the revolution, said that Bashar Assad has personally supervised procedures guiding new laws to guarantee his re-election.
The source said the plan is to disable any possible rivals through new modifications of the law related to the conditions required to be nominated.
The new law states that "the nominee should gain the signatures of 35 members in the current parliament, should have be living continuously in Syria for the last ten years, and he should have his full civil rights." In other words, only those within Assad's close circle are able to run for the presidential elections.
The second procedure is to exclude the Syrians living in the refugees camps by preventing them from returning to the country if they don’t have official documents from Syrian embassies abroad.
The third procedure is to prevent Syrians living in countries where the opposition is more popular among the Syrian community (namely, the United States, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) from voting, as the Syrian embassies of these three countries will be closed by the end of March.
"Though the embassies of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait bring an amount of foreign currency equal to four embassies, because of the huge number of Syrians living there, the orders were given to close the embassies by the end of this month," the source said.
These procedures prove that Assad is terrified and he knows he will not succeed in any free elections.
Translated and edited by The Syrian Observer
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