The nationalists suffered losses in the elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but remain the decisive force in the Balkan country’s complicated power structure.
The social democrat Denis Becirovic is likely to move into the three-headed state presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
(dpa) In the battle for the three-headed state presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, two out of three nationalist candidates were defeated on Sunday, as the election commission in Sarajevo announced on Monday after counting 85 percent of the votes.
The social democrat Denis Becirovic celebrated the most obvious success of non-nationalist reform forces. With 57 percent of the votes, he secured the Bosniak seat in the state presidency. The leader of the Muslim nationalist SDA party, Bakir Izetbegovic, who dominates Bosnian Muslims, lost 38 percent of the votes. For the first time in twelve years, no SDA politician will be represented in the state presidency.
The bourgeois reformer Zeljko Komsic was able to defend the Croatian seat in the state presidency against a candidate from the nationalist HDZ party. The Serbian seat clearly went to a nationalist from the Serb Republic (RS). Zeljka Cvijanovic is a confidant of the strongman in the Serb republic, the separatist Milorad Dodik. He had occupied the Serbian position in the state presidency for the past four years.
Dominance of national parties in parliament
In addition to the state presidency, the citizens also elected the federal parliament, the parliaments in the two largely independent parts of the country, the presidency in the Serbian Republic (RS) and the cantonal administrations in the Bosnian-Croatian Federation (FBiH).
This time Dodik himself applied for the presidency of the RS. According to the electoral commission, he won with 49 percent of the vote against the conservative economist Jelena Trivic with 43 percent. In the Federal Parliament, the continuing dominance of the national parties is becoming apparent. In the FBiH part of the country, the SDA was the strongest force with 25 percent of the votes cast there, followed by the Croatian HDZ with 19 and the Social Democrats with 12 percent of the votes.
In the Serb Republic, Dodik’s SNSD remains the strongest party with 42 percent of the votes cast in the RS for the federal parliament. The moderate nationalist SDS and the conservative PDP follow with 19 and 11 percent respectively. No information was initially available on the distribution of mandates in the national representative body.
Government blocks change in country
According to initial assessments, the situation in Bosnia remains difficult because the nationalist forces can continue to block each other. Dodik is also aiming for a secession of the RS from Bosnia and enjoys the support of Russia, Serbia and Hungary. The Croatian HDZ, in turn, is trying to weaken the state as a whole in order to separate its own ethnic “entity” from the part of the Bosnian-Croatian federation. She is supported by Croatia and some Western diplomats.
The power struggles and the corrupt clientele politics of the long-established national parties prevent the country from solving its real problems: economic backwardness, bad administration, a weak constitutional state. Unlike Ukraine and Moldova, Bosnia-Herzegovina still does not have EU candidate status. As a prerequisite, the Union requires that the country eliminate 14 grievances in the areas of administration, the rule of law and equal treatment of citizens.