February 10, 2026
Jamie Allinson
Jamie Allinson teaches politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ’The Age of Counter-revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East’ (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Arabic version
The success of the new Syrian administration, established in the ruins of fifteen years of civil war and counter-revolution, depends upon economic recovery. Every move of the new regime in Damascus on the international and regional stage–obtaining US sanctions relief through Saudi good offices, seeking Gulf and Turkish investment, intimating the possibility of normalisation with Israel even as the latter occupies even more sovereign Syrian territory–seems directed towards this goal.
This focus is unsurprising. Syria lies in a state of economic devastation. 90% of the population live in poverty: 69% require humanitarian assistance. The currency has completely collapsed to one-hundredth of its 2011 value against the US dollar. Between 2011 and 2023, Syria's population decreased and GDP (at least) halved, leaving a per capita GDP only one quarter of the 2011 level. Agricultural production has fallen to a quarter of the pre-war level while the limited oil reserves remain outside of Damascus' control in the autonomous areas of Rojava. By the time of its fall, the former regime had been reduced to subsisting on external support, extortion and the Captagon trade. The country owes $30 bn to Russia and Iran, sponsors of the former regime. Few would challenge the idea that the transitional administration has a mountain to climb.
More of the Same? A Continuation of the Later Stages of the Assad Rule
Nonetheless, the policies adopted by Ahmed al-Shara’a and his cabinet repeat those of the later stages of the previous regime. Unlike his father, an economist who served the Syrian state under Hafez al-Assad in the heyday of Third World developmentalism, al-Shara’a the younger endorses the ideas of privatization, deregulation and reduction of state employment prevalent across the region, and the world: policies that Al-Shara’a père has described as a ‘grave mistake’. Al-Shara’a has declared that Syria would cease to operate the ‘social market economy’ of the later Ba'ath (and certainly not the proclaimed ‘socialism’ of the 1960s and 1970s) and instead become a ‘competitive free market economy.’ 250,000 public employees have already been sacked or placed on leave, including medics and emergency workers. At one point, members of the transitional administration appeared to be competing as to how many civil servants they wanted to sack: the finance minister saying only 900,000 of 1.3 million public employees were required; according to the development minister only 600,000.
There is no doubt that Syria’s public sector served as a means of patronage for the former regime and that many salaries are drawn by employees who do not exist. But the idea that the country’s fortunes will be revived by private enterprise, while providing the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of sacked public sector workers (and exacerbating the fears of religious minorities who are over-represented in public sector employment) is surely just as fantastical. For one thing, who is going to educate and care for a workforce that has undergone a decade and a half of unspeakable violence and displacement, where a third of schools have been destroyed or damaged and only a minority of thirteen-year-olds can read a simple paragraph-long story in Arabic? As in Gaza, as in Yemen or Sudan as in all the areas of the region where genocide, counter-revolution and civil war have wreaked devastation, far more and not less public investment will be required to recover.
“Changing Souls” Through the Economy: Technocracy as Political Tool
The idea that the only solution to Syria's economic problems is more privatization and more inequality is reflected in the claim that the new regime’s policies are ‘technocratic’. And indeed both the new finance minister and the new economy minister come from a non-Islamist background, the former in fact having served in the cabinet at one point under the old regime’s initial turn to neoliberalism. But there is nothing inevitable or necessarily ‘pragmatic’ about the adoption of free market policies. At another moment of crisis in Syria's history, from which the Ba’ath regime emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, political parties and military officers all converged on a consensus that the pragmatic response to the country's economic crisis was the adoption of state-led development in the ‘guided economy.’
Privatization and free markets, or the policy prescription that has come to be known as ‘neoliberalism’, is a political and not a technical choice. But there is more to Ahmed al-Shara'a and HTS’ economic policy than technocracy– or rather, to borrow from Mrs Thatcher, for neo-liberalism ‘economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.’ The new administration sees economic policy as part of a wider moral and political project, based upon representing - as they see it - the wronged Sunni majority of the Syrian population even if not necessarily within the framework of an Islamic state.
This belief marks a surprising continuity with the former dispensation. Casting around for an ideological precept with which to replace the previous constitution's commitment to ‘socialism’, in 2005 Bashar replaced this term with ‘social market economy.’ No doubt the ‘social’ aspect offered ideological solace to a Ba’ath party implementing what was in essence the Washington consensus of the time. But the term had a longer history in German economic thought- that of the ‘Freiburg School’ or ‘ordoliberals’ who preceded the familiar neoliberals such as Friedrich Von Hayek and Milton Freidman. For the Ordoliberals, such as, working first in the Weimar republic and then in exile from the Nazis, the free market was a fragile moral achievement, not merely a technical means of distributing resources. Its functioning required a social and ethical order, preferably one underpinned by Christianity. As Europe secularised, Ordoliberals such as Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken believed, people began to treat ‘the economy’as a replacement for God: instead of trusting prayers to providence for their livelihood, making demands of employers and the state. This secularism encouraged the proletarian class consciousness that the Ordoliberals saw as the main threat to the market and therefore to society as a whole.
Key ordoliberal thinkers such as Röpke spent their exile in Istanbul, helping create the disciplinary foundations of economics in Turkish universities. One of Ropke's students, Fathi Sabry Ulgener, was very influential on the ‘Islamic Calvinism’, to borrow the phrase of Abdullah Güll, of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). This ideological milieu in turn greatly influenced HTS, albeit far from directly.
Ordoliberalism at Work: An Islamist Administration of the Capitalist Market
This idea of separating civil society from the (Islamic) state marks a departure from the Salafi-Jihadist tradition in which HTS emerged. Armed Salafi-Jihadist groups have tended to follow one of two strategies: ‘propaganda of the deed’ directed against the ‘far enemy’ of the US, Israel and the West more broadly; or taking advantage of the collapse of order to establish their own form of state with no place for an independent civil society. Da’esh attempted to do both and failed. HTS, in its former incarnation as the dominant armed faction in Idlib, worked in a new way. Rather than seek to both dominate and administer civil society in the fashion of Da’esh, they worked with a partially independent force, the Syrian Salvation Government. This arrangement insulated HTS from direct discontent, for example in the SSG cabinet’s resignation in 2019 following demonstrations against HTS (and especially its agricultural tax on olive oil) that the latter suppressed with violent force.
This approach has continued since the defeat of the Assad regime. Unlike Da’esh–and contrary to the predictions of many of its opponents– the transitional administration shows no sign of any desire to impose an imagined Islamic order on a pulverized civil society. Rather, the emerging constitutional underpinnings suggest an Islamist administration of the capitalist market. Mention of economic development in the constitutional declaration of March 2025 is scant but revealing. Article 11 lists ‘social justice’, ‘comprehensive economic development’ and a raised standard of living as the ‘aims’ of the national economy. The latter entity is to rest on ‘free and fair competition’ and ‘the prevention of monopoly’ while simultaneously providing ‘investors…an attractive legal environment’– an unusual requirement to be written into a provisional basic law. In fact, the provision of an attractive legal environment for investment is given as much space in the constitutional declaration as Islam. Since the declaration is supposed to be a transitional document, this article also forecloses the possibility that the Syrian people might wish to place their own needs for public investment above those of investors for an attractive legal environment. Such hardwiring of market principles into the constitutional architecture is a key component of Ordoliberal practice. These ideas were echoed by the contributions of the finance minister Mohammed Yisr Barnieh and the development minister Mohammed Nidal Al-Shaar at the founding conference of the transitional administration in March this year, both of which concentrated on the role of the state as a guarantor of private investment as the engine of growth.
Given the nightmare from which Syrians have emerged, and the parlous state in which most now live, it is unsurprising that many have placed great hope in the new administration’s attempt to revive the economy by free-market means. But a new order in which democracy is –at best– limited to the non-economic realm is unlikely to relieve the suffering of the population nor to solve the problems that led to the revolutionary uprising of 2011: the very movement from which HTS seeks to draw its legitimacy.