THE Syrian regime likes to keep up the appearance of a constitutional state rather than one run by a family cabal girded by a ruthless security apparatus. So when diplomats tried to mediate between the regime and the opposition in Geneva in February, President Bashar Assad’s people were already talking earnestly about his own “political solution”: the holding of presidential elections. By winning another seven-year-term in polls announced for June 3rd, Mr Assad, who technically must declare his candidacy by May 1st, can avoid the pain of sharing power with the opposition in a transitional government. Instead, he intends to show the world that his people want him to go on reigning over them. Mr Assad’s presidency was last approved by 98% in a referendum in 2007, when he was the sole candidate. Syria’s polls have invariably been rigged under the Assads, father and son, who have run Syria since 1971. So far just one person, a little-known member of parliament, has said he will challenge the president. Many Syrians presume he is part of a prearranged political theatre.

Syria’s parliament is powerless. No member of the current opposition is likely to run. A recent law disqualifies candidates who have lived outside Syria during the past ten years or who hold citizenship elsewhere, ruling out many of Mr Assad’s opponents, long ago hounded out of the country. In any case, no one else has the machinery or the money to run a serious campaign, even if it could be held in conditions of war.

It is unclear if observers will be let in. Nor has the government said whether or how it will open polling booths in rebel-held parts of the country or in countries where Syria’s embassies have been closed. The state-controlled media say that 19m Syrians out of the estimated pre-war total of 23m still live in government-controlled areas. That is unlikely to be true: the UN reckons 2.7m Syrians have fled the country and that another 6.7m, about a third of the population, have been displaced. The rebel-held areas, covering swathes of the country, are less densely populated but encompass at least a quarter of the people.

The irony is that had Mr Assad, as soon as Syrians rose up in March 2011, offered genuine reforms, unbanned political parties and called elections, he might have won fair and square. Syrians were disgruntled with the security state and corruption but many saw Mr Assad and his fashionable wife as reformers. That is certainly not the case now.