The re-election of the incumbent president, Bashar Assad, on Sunday by referendum will far exceed the minimum 51% of the ballots required by law. The vote for Bashar will match or even exceed the 97.3% that he secured seven years ago as the sole candidate.
The only difference is that in 2000, Bashar Assad - a 34-year-old London-trained ophthalmologist who later passed the general (military) staff course - was unsure of himself and his grip on power as he stepped into the shoes of his father, Hafiz Assad, an air force general, who had ruled Syria for 32 years with an iron hand.
By contrast, this time Bashar Assad came through as a confident and even defiant politician as he projected himself as a ruler who had survived the setbacks of the withdrawal of the Syrian troops from Lebanon under western pressure in 2005, followed by two years of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation imposed on Syria by the United States.
He claimed, rightly, that he had given Syrians security and stability in a region where the ongoing jihadist-fuelled Sunni insurgency and the Shia-Sunni violence in Iraq threaten to spill over across its borders.
Syria is particularly vulnerable on the sectarian front. Two-thirds of Syrians are Sunni, the rest being Alawi, a subsect within Shiite Islam - who hold the levers of power, with Assad at the top - and Druze and Christian. An injection of sectarian identification and loyalty will destabilise the regime founded on the Baathist ideology of secularism and socialism.
Leaving aside the American and British governments' public and private motives for invading Iraq in 2003, which posed no threat to them or its neighbours, the end-result of their illegal misadventure has been to heighten sectarian loyalty in Iraq to the point of bloodletting. On their part, Washington and London claim credit for implanting democracy in Iraq.
The authoritarian and semi-authoritarian Arab regimes in the region have been quick to warn that the American model of democracy will tear apart national identity and create divisive sectarian and ethnic identities, turning the region into mini-states along the post-Yugoslavia model. This message has fallen on receptive ears among their citizens who, chastened by the mayhem in Iraq, have come to value security and stability as never before, and have lost interest in securing freedoms of speech and association.
What has also aided the Arab rulers is the intense anti-Washington sentiment prevalent throughout the region due to the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq for reasons that turned out to be false. They have little difficulty in marginalising the advocates of political liberalisation by describing them as allies of the much-hated Bush White House, often branding them as anti-patriotic.
Earlier this month, a Syrian court punished Kamal Labwani, an opposition leader, by sentencing him to 15 years for "communicating with a foreign country and inciting it to initiate aggression against Syria" following his meeting with American officials in Washington.
This provided a contrast to the events that followed the election of Bashar Assad as president in July 2000.
He released 600 of the 2,100 political prisoners. When 99 leading intellectuals demanded an end to the 37-year-old martial law, his government announced that the emergency laws had been suspended. (See Dilip Hiro, The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide, pp 54-55.)
Assad also started to loosen state control over the economy by privatising public sector undertakings. This process had continued, leading to privately owned banks and insurance companies.
But in the political-administrative sphere, the freshly re-elected President Assad is set to follow the footsteps of his father.