Parties that rely on ethnic, sectarian, religious, tribal, or regional bases usually represent the interests of a single group, highlighting and exploiting internal conflicts to gain support, They play a negative role in weakening the nascent democratic structure in the post-conflict phase, whether after liberation from an authoritarian regime or foreign occupation. At a time when countries characterized by societal pluralism and diversity need broad-based political parties and popular unions with general national goals that concern all members of society, regardless of their affiliations, loyalties, or regions, and that represent the largest gathering of interests that transcend narrow loyalties, an example of which is the Indian National Congress, which has had a positive impact on the social integration of India and manages competition within the party in a country with more than (1000) ethnic, linguistic, religious, sectarian, and religious groups, The same is true in Malaysia and other countries with societal pluralism.
To prevent societal divisions in many developing countries characterized by social pluralism and diversity, it has become essential to secure constitutional and legislative requirements that prohibit parties with ethnic, sectarian, religious, tribal, or regional affiliations from participating in elections. These parties should be required to have a purely national orientation before being registered, licensed, and approved to participate in political and electoral life. This can be achieved by stipulating that party members come from multiple geographical areas within the country, rather than a single region, and represent diverse ethnicities, religions, sects, and schools of thought, thus preventing any one social group from dominating the party, Many countries have already banned such parties; Turkey, for example, prohibits Islamist parties from participating in the party system and subsequently in elections, Similarly, many ethnic parties have been banned in several African countries.
Many countries today are enacting laws regarding the party system stipulating that the party name and slogans must not have any ethnic, sectarian, religious, tribal, or regional connotations, for fear of secession from the motherland, Among them is Indonesia, which consists of (4000) islands, by prohibiting regional parties to preserve its unity, especially after East Timor separated from the motherland in 1999, and by establishing a party system to confront separatist-regional tendencies. Hence, some developing countries have placed many restrictions when issuing the law on parties, which stipulates the necessity of having a national base for any party as a condition for entering elections, as Turkey does, which stipulates that parties must have broad popular representation and purely national orientations that do not discriminate between citizens on non-national bases, and that their members must be spread across half of the Turkish provinces when they submit an application for approval to establish any party. It should be noted that establishing homogeneous party systems in societies that have lived through long periods of internal conflicts is not easy, because parties tend to tend towards the same groups that participated in the original fighting, which will inevitably lead to the existence of a polarized party system, and the continuation of the old conflict within the framework of a new democracy if a national party system that transcends all sectarianism is not established.
Parties based on ethnic, racial, sectarian, or religious grounds that represent the interests of a single group will negatively affect democracy and lead to internal conflict, as seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Iraq, This is because they increase emotional tension, deepen groups’ sense of their singular identity, transfer historically inherited conflicts to the current political arena, and increase individuals’ sense of belonging to a narrow ethnicity at the expense of belonging to the state, This results in the absence of political, cultural, and value consensus, and the nascent democratic system lacks the stability necessary for any political system, The danger of ethnic divisions increases, as they tend to coincide with party divisions, meaning that each sect, denomination, race, or tribe has a party that represents its interests.
in conclusion :
* The solution for emerging democracies with a pluralistic societal nature, including Syria, is to adopt a party system that prevents the participation of racist, sectarian, religious, regional, and tribal parties in elections.
* The party system in Syria during the democratic eras after independence did not include the participation of sub-national, ethnic, sectarian, religious, regional or tribal political organizations in parliamentary elections.
* The current political government must provide sufficient support to political parties so that they can perform their assigned role and help them become an instrument for integrating ethnic groups into a homeland that accommodates everyone.
* The Syrian people are still waiting for the release of the Parties Law after the liberation from the Assad regime, which was stipulated in the Constitutional Declaration in Article (14) as a prelude to starting a new political life in Syria based on political pluralism and the prohibition of parties with ethnic, sectarian, religious, tribal and regional bases based on non-national foundations, as they dismantle the unity of the land and people and are a prelude to secession. Therefore, it is necessary for parties to reflect in their membership the nationally acceptable diversity.
