Tyrant, war criminal, mob boss or, to his loyalists, their shrewd saviour: views about Bashar al-Assad rarely fall in between. As the Syrian leader faces a presidential poll on Wednesday – the result a foregone conclusion – a truer test of the authority he wields across a broken country has taken shape away from the political banners and faux campaigning.

In battered towns and villages, ravaged by a decade of savagery, the now veteran president has been clawing back losses, consolidating himself as the only figure who could plot a course from the ruins of the region’s most devastating modern conflict. Slowly, over the past year, Assad and his extended family have been shoring up their influence. Seldom seen during much of the crisis, he has become a fixture in what remains of Syria’s industrial heartland, visiting factories, pressing employees on their hardships, and hosting delegations with an ease few observed at the height of the fighting.

Syria’s allies Russia and Iran may have done the heavy lifting to save the regime from defeat on the battlefields but a more traditional structure, the house of Assad, has been just as integral in holding the country together from within. The husk of Syria is, in many ways, more under the Assad family’s control than at the war’s outset. Power structures established over four decades have anchored dynasty and dictatorship.

As the civil war ground to a stalemate, and Islamic State (Isis) was defeated, Assad and his wife, Asma, made an extraordinary move to oust Syria’s wealthiest man. Rami Makhlouf, a first cousin of Assad and financial consigliere, was an untouchable – until all of a sudden he wasn’t.