One year of new Syrian rule: progress and challenges

Yet Syrians do not judge the government through planning documents or institutional charts. They judge it by how state policy affects daily life, regardless of the structural constraints and limited resources involved. Livelihoods, services, and security matter most because they determine whether people can afford basic necessities, keep the lights on, move around, earn a living, and feel safe in their homes and communities.

These are therefore the most immediate and politically meaningful measures of government performance. They are also the areas in which the government's record appears most mixed. There have been visible improvements in all three, but they have often come at higher costs, with uneven delivery, or with limitations that have reduced their impact on people's lives.

Availability vs affordability

On livelihoods, the government's most visible move was to raise public-sector pay. President Sharaa issued decrees granting a 200% increase in June 2025 and a further 50% increase in March 2026 to public-sector workers. Together, these measures have also raised the minimum wage from 250,000 to 1,256,000 Syrian pounds—an overall increase of just over 400%. Given the state's limited revenues and competing demands, both the pace and the scale of these increases were significant.

But the impact has been limited. Even for those who benefited, the increases still fall short of basic needs and have been quickly eroded by inflation and rising costs. Their limits are even sharper outside the public sector, where most Syrians were excluded altogether. Without broader measures to create jobs, support productive sectors, and stabilise the market, the policy offered relief for some, but recovery for few.

The same pattern runs through services. The government has eased shortages of bread and fuel and, more importantly, improved the electricity supply. But those gains have delivered only limited relief because they were accompanied by steep price increases after subsidies were rolled back. In former regime-held areas, bread prices rose roughly tenfold. Electricity tariffs increased even more sharply, by around 60-190 fold, depending on consumption levels.

Many Syrians now face a stark paradox: services are more available, but often unaffordable. Given the government's weak revenues, ending the old subsidy model was understandable. But the way prices were restructured was not the only option. A more gradual approach, tied to income growth and combined with targeted support for the most vulnerable, could have reduced the social cost.

Security follows a similar logic. It is where the government can claim its strongest partial gains, but also where the limits of those gains are most exposed. In major urban centres, there are signs of greater day-to-day stability, and crime appears to have fallen in some areas. But this should not be mistaken for nationwide consolidation. Security conditions still vary sharply by region, and some areas remain vulnerable to recurring instability, local tensions, and communal violence.

More importantly, gains in order have been overshadowed by serious abuses, including mass violations and revenge killings against those accused of ties to the former regime. In the absence of a credible transitional justice track, grievances have too often been channelled through retaliation rather than law, leaving tensions unresolved, deepening communal fears, and raising the risk that local incidents spiral into wider violence.

Taken together, these trends point to a broader conclusion: the government's problem is not the absence of progress altogether. It is that limited gains are repeatedly blunted by the way the state is being run.

Structural problem

That is why the deeper problem is not the shortcomings of any single sector, but the government's governing model itself. Over its first year, structural weaknesses have surfaced across different policy areas, helping explain why even real gains have remained limited.

The first is weak coordination. Ministries often appear to operate in parallel rather than as parts of a unified strategy. Policies can seem fragmented, poorly sequenced, and only loosely aligned. The result is not just bureaucratic inefficiency, but a broader impression of a government that reacts to events rather than executes a coherent national plan.

The second is the lack of transparency. In a transition, transparency is not a cosmetic virtue; it is one of the few ways a government can build credibility while institutions remain weak. When decisions are opaque, citizens do not simply lack information. They begin to suspect that power is being exercised elsewhere, informally, or without accountability.

That perception has fuelled wider concerns about a shadow style of governance, in which real decision-making is concentrated in narrow circles while formal institutions merely implement choices made behind closed doors. Whether or not that description is accurate, the fact that it resonates points to a serious legitimacy problem.

A third weakness is the bottleneck style of management, visible both within ministries and across government as a whole. Too much appears to depend on narrow decision-making channels, slowing both process and progress.

Then there is the absence of meaningful public participation. Major decisions continue to be made from the top down, with little visible consultation and limited space for society to shape policy. In a fragile transition, some centralisation is inevitable. But when centralisation becomes a substitute for public engagement, it risks widening the gap between ruler and ruled at precisely the moment when legitimacy needs to be broadened.

These weaknesses are compounded by staffing problems. The sidelining of experienced personnel, the weak reintegration of some previously dismissed employees, and accusations of loyalty-based appointments have all raised questions about whether the state is being rebuilt on competence or on narrower networks of trust. That matters because effective governance depends not only on authority, but on administrative depth.

Managing expectations

One year on, Syria's government should be judged neither by unrealistic expectations nor by its own claims of progress. It inherited a devastated state, a broken economy, and a fractured society. No government could have fully reversed such conditions within 12 months. But that cannot become an excuse for structurally weak governance.

The first year has revealed both the possibilities and the limits of the current approach. It has shown that partial improvements are possible, but also that they are unlikely to endure without deeper reforms in how the state functions.

The key question now is not whether there will be a reshuffle, but whether the next year brings a different way of governing: clearer priorities, stronger coordination, greater transparency, and more institutional decision-making.

Without that, Syria risks remaining stuck in a cycle of crisis administration that produces just enough progress to avoid collapse, but not enough reform to build trust. With it, the second year could begin to look less like survival and more like the start of state-building.