Hope Fades for Election Deal on Mostar, Bosnia

The old bridge in Mostar | Photo: Flickr

Bosnia’s parliament will vote at the end of April on a draft law proposed by the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZBiH, which may represent the last chance this year to reform the electoral law in Mostar and organise local elections in the southern city.

At a conference organised on Wednesday in Mostar, the Croatian member of the Bosnian Presidency and leader of the HDZBiH, Dragan Covic, said his party would submit a proposal to change the election law to the parliament, adding that there will be no more negotiations with the main Bosniak party, the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, on the issue.

The Mostar-based newspaper Dnevni List, which has published the draft, said the HDZBiH proposed keeping Mostar as a united municipality and changing the composition of the city council so that none of the three constitutive peoples of Bosnia, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, has a majority of seats.

“Mostar needs to remain a united city without any kind of internal divisions,” Covic said, adding that he “didn’t see any other proposal”.

Following a ruling of the Constitutional Court, which declared Mostar’s electoral statute unconstitutional, the city missed holding local elections in 2012.

Mostar’s two main parties, the HDZBiH and SDA, have since been unable to find a compromise to reform the law.

On Monday, the President of the Bosnian Electoral Commission, Ahmet Santic, confirmed that local elections will be called on May 4 in Bosnia and organised on October 2.

Any modification to the existing electoral law, therefore, needs to be approved before May 4.

According to the HDZBiH, the draft will likely be submitted to the next session of the House of Representatives, which will probably be on April 27.

However, this initiative is likely to fail, Faruk Kajtaz, head of the journalists’ association of Mostar, told BIRN.

“There is no political consensus around this proposal … although the Chamber of Representatives might approve it, the Chamber of Peoples is likely to dismiss it,” Kajtaz said.

SDA leader and Bosniak member of the Bosnian Presidency Bakir Izetbegovic has meanwhile criticised the proposal of the HDZBiH.

“There is nothing of what we agreed on [in the proposal]… there was no need for this,” Izetbegovic said, adding that the two parties should have first agreed on a joint solution before proposing it to the public.

Without the SDA’s support, this plan is unlikely to be approved.

With little time left left before May 4, if this law does not pass, local elections will not be organised in Mostar for the second time in a row, Kajtaz argued.

“Most likely, elections in Mostar will not take place this October,” he noted, adding that at this point only extraordinary measures taken by the Bosnian authorities or the international community might allow local elections to take place in this municipality.

Ivana Maric, a political analyst based in Sarajevo, agrees that the HDZBiH proposal will probably fail and that elections in Mostar are likely not to happen for the second time.

“Our politicians are not used to the idea of reaching a compromise,” Maric told BIRN, adding that nobody is willing to take responsibility for their choices on Mostar’s future.

Maric urged people in Mostar to react and put pressure on their political representatives to find a solution.

“Residents in Mostar should raise their voices … but so far, nobody is reacting to this situation,” Maric concluded.