Bosnia’s Central Election Commission on Tuesday officially declared the next general election for October 7.
However, the nationwide ballot may well not lead to the establishment of new governments, thanks to local politicians’ zero-sum games and a broken election law.
While the elections are still five months away, all the political parties are already deep in their election campaigns, which traditionally feature a good deal of nationalist and populist rhetoric, despite fears that further political and ethnic tensions could bring down the whole system of governance system or even trigger violence.
“The election campaign does not officially start until September but, with all the things happening now, we can surely say it has already started,” Zlatiborka Popov Momcinovic, a Sarajevo-based analyst, told BIRN.
The current atmosphere is marked by renewed separatist threats from the mainly Serbian entity, Republika Srpska, by a Bosnian Croat push to establish an autonomous Croat entity, as well as by Bosniak parties’ attempts to dominate the country and outvote their Croat and Serbian counterparts.
Relentless quarrels within and among the three ethno-political blocs, augmented by the growing influence of different regional and global players, threaten to polarize or even split the country apart.
This situation concerns Bosnian citizens as well as the EU and the US. But, despite repeated warnings, both groups seem clueless about what to do about it.
Speaking before the US Congress Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats on April 18, which focused on the Western Balkans, US Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Palmer warned that Bosnia was “facing its most serious challenges since the 1990s, which, if left unchecked, could have serious consequences for the Western Balkans, Europe, and the United States”.
Another speaker, Kurt Bassuener, Co-Founder and Senior Associate of the Democratization Policy Council think tank, was even blunter.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
