In America, Syria’s president Ahmed al-Sharaa is at the centre of a diplomatic and media whirlwind. His interview with former CIA director and retired general David Petraeus at the Concordia Summit this week was almost like a dream. Al-Sharaa had been imprisoned in Camp Bucca – one of the terrorist ‘universities’ inside Iraq – when Petraeus had commanded occupying forces there nearly two decades ago. Now, the two of them met after a further 14 years of civil war in Syria: the American, who finished his career with government service as an adviser to US officials; and the Syrian, who toppled the Assad regime to become the interim president of his country.

Later, al-Sharaa, in town to address the UN General Assembly, the first time in many years that a Syrian president has been able to participate in international summits, was rapturously received at a reception for Syrian-Americans. When al-Sharaa briefly met Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he was asked in Arabic if the sanctions on Syria were going to be lifted. ‘Ask him’, al-Sharaa replied, gesturing at Rubio’s retreating back with both hands. In general, there was an optimistic, even amused, mood to many of al-Sharaa’s American engagements.

In Syria, however, despite the new school year beginning on schedule this Sunday, some things are different and not so sunny. A southern portion of the country near the Golan Heights is occupied by Israel, whose air force carries out trial bombings periodically on military sites across the country, including the presidential palace – a signal hard to mistake for anything other than a threat to Syria’s president. The province of Suwayda remains in turmoil, with periodic assassinations of militia or ‘national guard’ figures by culprits so far unknown. The country’s north-east, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), militarily led by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), remains hostile to, and worried about the intentions of, the centre in Damascus.

Members of Syria’s re-opened parliament, the People’s Assembly, were meant to be chosen this month. But because of a greater than expected number of candidates, the relevant supreme committee said, elections were delayed, first to the end of September, and then to 5 October, when they are now scheduled to take place.

To call what will happen in October ‘elections’ at all might be to use a misnomer. A third of the final 210 People’s Assembly members will be appointed by the president directly. Syrians at large are not voting: instead, local electoral colleges have been convened by regional assemblies for each district (themselves superintended by an 11-person commission formed by the president). It is the electoral colleges who will make the choice of each area’s representative. Across Syria, there are 6,000 members of electoral colleges; the final elected MLAs will be chosen from among their ranks.

In part, the reasons for this are practical. There is no electoral roll – official numbers are cluttered up with the dead, and with people who exist only on paper. Without an overhaul of ID documents nationwide, and a new census, it would be hard to prove whether someone was owed a vote or not. Syria’s population is, by and large, an unknown quantity. Census numbers are out of date and corrupted by the old regime’s processes of data collection. It is impossible to know, without making it a priority, who lives where and is of voting age. And without that, it is hard to divide up parliamentary seats accurately by population.

Fourteen years of civil war internally displaced many millions of Syrians, and sent millions more abroad. Almost a million Syrians have returned to the country since the fall of the regime, government statistics say. But with all this change, it would be hard to allocate electoral districts. Parts of the country that ought to have representation are temporarily depopulated as a result of the war. When the bulldozers clear the demolished houses and new building takes place, who is to predict the numbers who will return to formerly empty towns and villages? Would it be right to deny those areas representation for years, the length of a parliamentary term of 30 months, because their legal residents have not yet returned to their homes?

Meanwhile, the parts of the country under occupation or in tension with Damascus – the South, Suwayda, the northern areas of the AANES – are not able to hold elections to a national parliament without risk of disapproval from those with regional power, or suppression, or violence.

There are also those who claim that electoral colleges and presidential appointments may produce candidates who are technocratic, even pragmatic (although that adjective was recently disavowed by al-Sharaa, who told CBS it had an unfortunate connotation in Arabic). The electoral colleges are staffed, official sources insist, with local experts, people who can choose figures like them – knowledgeable, uncontroversial, able to go to Damascus and get things done, unlike half a century of previous Syrian parliaments. And this, with the president’s appointments, might make it easier to ensure that the parliament is representative of tribal or religious minorities; and at least 20 per cent women, as the interim arrangements insist it must be; and at least two per cent disabled (hardly a high bar in a country where so many have war wounds that they will carry for life).

Other arguments against democracy crowd in. One of the rules for the electors is that they cannot have unhelpful ties to the apparatus of tyranny built by the last regime. Another type of election might not exclude those people, who only a few months ago attempted a coup against the new government. Polling stations and long lines of voters would be easy targets for insurgent groups allied to the former regime and Iran, or the desert-bound but aggressive relicts of the Islamic State (ISIS).

Plus, Syria has not had legitimate, national, non-synthetic political parties in decades. The best organised groups may be the remnants of the Ba’ath party of the Assads, or the communists (although, this seems unlikely, given their numbers), or the Islamists. The winner of other elections that followed the revolutions of the Arab Spring in the last decade was often enough an Islamist party; for instance the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Or, some say, an election in a country unused to them would only promote the loudest mouths, the sectarians, the warlords, the business grifters and opportunist oligarchs. At present, the electoral colleges are not open to sectarians of all stripes, the supreme commission says.

Better to appoint the first parliament since liberation, some insist: make it safe and useful – and then, only then, trust the people with a vote, electoral system to be determined. So far, the outside world seems content with this. Al-Sharaa’s reception in New York appears to prove this. Europe and the United States have been disappointed and concerned by elections in Arab countries before. Whether Syrians have the vote is of no intrinsic interest in Brussels or Washington. From their perspective, it is preferable that the country is run by the right sort of people, following advice when it is offered, getting on with things at home and decidedly not rocking the regional boat.

This logic is seductive, but it’s also an evasion. Syria’s new government is busy and yanked in many directions, but it could easily, if it dedicated the time to the problem, have come up with an electoral roll. It could have made a new census, decided on an interim electoral system, or – and this has been suggested by many – trialled democracy first on a local level, by electing village and town councils, devolved city administrations. That would have allowed them to try things out, to test the waters.

Very little of this was done. Instead, the government in Damascus has focused a chaotic all-hands-to-the-pump spirit on hiring people into the bureaucracy and as advisers, including from the Syrian diaspora, and putting in appointees to handle the technical jobs of rebuilding a shattered state.

Rumours always build up at times like this that the men in power have ulterior motives. Although it is reasonable to imagine this is true, we don’t have much evidence of it as yet. As al-Sharaa and his administration gear up to make diplomatic splash after diplomatic splash in New York – to announce to the world a new government that overthrew half a century of despicable tyranny – it might have been good to trial a real democracy taking its first unsteady steps at home, to have the beginnings of a truly free country to show the rest of the world.