Politics

Bosnia Heads Into Sunday Election With Country’s Postwar Order Under Strain

Photo courtesy of Element Digital/Unsplash

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Bosnia and Herzegovina heads into elections Sunday with its postwar political settlement under renewed strain as disputes over Republika Srpska’s autonomy, foreign intervention and the country’s constitutional future continue to divide its leaders.

More than 3.4 million registered voters are eligible to cast ballots Oct. 4 for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tripartite presidency, national parliament and regional governments, including the president and National Assembly of Republika Srpska, according to the Central Election Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has been divided into two entities since the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement: Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to the country’s Dayton-established constitution. The arrangement ended the 1992-1995 Bosnian War, and left substantial authority with the entities while establishing common institutions at the national level.

The government of Bosnia and Herzegovina has an incredibly complex system of leaders and regional representatives. It has three presidents, a Bosnian, a Croatian and a Serbian, while the autonomous region of Republika Srpska also has its own president.

The race for president of Republika Srpska is centered on four candidates, according to the Central Election Commission.

Current Republika Srpska Prime Minister Savo Minić is running for the governing Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, or SNSD, which is led by former President Milorad Dodik. Branko Blanuša, president of the opposition Serb Democratic Party, or SDS, is a professor at the University of Banja Luka and has consolidated support from much of the Republika Srpska opposition.

The other presidential candidates are Bogdan Jovanović, leader of the Život party, and independent candidate Marko Jorgić, according to the commission.

Željka Cvijanović and Marinko Božović are competing for the Serb seat in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three-member presidency. Cvijanović is the incumbent Serb member of the state-level presidency and previously served as both prime minister and president of Republika Srpska, according to her official presidency biography. She is running on behalf of the ruling SNSD and is closely aligned with Dodik.

Dodik previously called for the independence of Republika Srpska in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“We are the people who need our freedom and liberty,” Dodik previously told the DCNF through a translator. “And, we deserve our freedom and liberty.”

“And that would be the great, historical act of President Trump in the Balkans,” Dodik previously told the DCNF. “To support our liberty, freedom and independence. In the history of Serbs, then, he would become one of the most prominent figures.”

The Dayton Peace Agreement was twisted and weaponized against the ethnic Serbians and Dodik in Republika Srpska, Obrad Kesić, the ambassador and head of mission of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the European Union, told the DCNF.

“Basically, they did to him what they wanted to do to Trump, which is weaponize the justice system, come at him with all these cases to turn him into a criminal in order to prevent him from participating in political life of the country, and so he couldn’t be re-elected,” Kesić told the DCNF.

U.N. High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina Christian Schmidt used his international authority in July 2023 to unilaterally amend Bosnia and Herzegovina’s criminal code, making failure to implement a decision of the High Representative punishable by six months to five years in prison.

“They had to come up with a new law that made it a crime to disobey the high representative, and that’s what they did. The Christian Schmidt, the German, imposed this law,” Kesić told the DCNF. “Dayton guarantees you that the Bosniaks cannot remove elected leaders for the Serbs … but this process was a total destruction of Dayton because it was a Bosniak judge who took the case, who sentenced the elected president on the basis of an imposed law that totally defies everything the EU stands for when it comes to the rule of law.”

Schmidt simultaneously blocked Republika Srpska legislation intended to prevent decisions of Bosnia’s Constitutional Court and the High Representative from taking effect inside the entity. His official order declared that his decision would take precedence over any inconsistent provision of Republika Srpska’s constitution, laws or future acts.

Scrutiny of Dodik’s removal has since reached Washington. Republican Utah Rep. Celeste Maloy asked the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in an Aug. 31 letter, exclusively obtained by the DCNF, to review allegations that Schmidt and members of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Central Election Commission interfered with the democratic process in Republika Srpska.

“For me, that totally undermines all this talk about these core democratic values that the EU represents,” Kesić told the DCNF. “And unfortunately, for the EU, I think that they’re going down the wrong path. I think JD Vance was totally correct in his criticism in Munich, where he’s basically said, ‘Look, you’re talking the talk, but you’re not walking the walk,’ and that’s what I feel after over three years of being in Brussels.”

“We must do more than talk about Democratic Values,” Vice President JD Vance said during a speech in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 14, 2025. “We must live them.”

Dodik later became the most prominent person convicted under the new criminal provision.

The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina convicted Dodik in February 2025 of failing to implement decisions of the High Representative, sentencing him to one year in prison and barring him from serving as Republika Srpska president for six years. An appellate panel subsequently upheld the conviction, according to the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Central Election Commission then terminated Dodik’s presidential mandate on Aug. 6, 2025. Dodik had been elected president by Republika Srpska voters in the 2022 general election.

The constitutional confrontation escalated further in March 2025 when the Republika Srpska National Assembly formally adopted a decision establishing a draft of a new entity constitution, according to the National Assembly. Lawmakers subsequently opened the document to public debate.

Schmidt has since left office. American diplomat Louis Crishock took over as acting High Representative on July 1 and retained the office’s authority under the Dayton framework, according to the Office of the High Representative.

Despite the constitutional confrontation, Schmidt told the United Nations Security Council in May that Bosnia’s overall security environment remained stable and that there was “no imminent security crisis,” while warning of an ongoing crisis in the country’s political institutions, according to his official address.

Independence from Bosnia has long attracted significant support within Republika Srpska, although surveys have produced substantially different results over time. More recent academic research based on a representative February 2024 survey of 918 voting-age Republika Srpska residents found an average response of 2.87 on a five-point scale when participants were asked how likely they would be to vote for the entity to leave Bosnia and become an independent country, according to the original study published in Nations and Nationalism.

The dispute has repeatedly produced warnings about what would happen if Republika Srpska attempted to leave the country.

Bosnian Defense Minister Zukan Helez challenged Dodik in February to follow through on his longstanding calls for secession, saying authorities had a fully developed and lawful “Plan B” prepared in response. Helez said Republika Srpska would cease to exist if it attempted to break away, according to Helez’s original Facebook post, N1 Bosnia reported.

Years of confrontation between Republika Srpska officials and the international authorities empowered to oversee implementation of the Dayton agreement are pushing tensions high this election year.

The security of Europe is also deeply tied to the migrant and refugee crisis that has been rocking the continent since 2015, Kesić told the DCNF.

“How do we build security, a sense of security? Well, it starts with borders,” Kesić told the DCNF. “Trump had it right, and unfortunately, still in Europe, there are still many of the political elite that live in bubbles, especially in the European Parliament. They just don’t understand that their citizens don’t feel secure.”

Europe has absorbed millions of asylum seekers since the 2015 migrant crisis. EU countries received roughly 8.65 million first-time asylum applications from non-EU citizens between 2015 and 2025, according to annual data from Eurostat, with applications peaking at about 1.22 million in 2015 and 1.17 million in 2016 before climbing above one million again in 2023.

Those figures do not include Ukrainians covered by the EU’s separate temporary-protection system, under which roughly 4.35 million people who fled Ukraine still held protection in the bloc at the end of 2025, according to Eurostat.

“Their citizens are losing hope for prosperity and a more prosperous future, and more importantly, their citizens feel that they have less freedom now than they did only a few years ago,” Kesić told the DCNF. “All of that is something here that’s very essential and important for a sense of security for Bosnians and Herzegovinians of all persuasion, whether they’re Serbs, Croats, or Bosnians.”