Dodik’s Party Sweeps the Bosnian Elections
Milorad Dodik’s ally Željka Cvijanović took more than 55% of the vote for the Serb seat on Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, about thirty points clear, with nearly 90% counted. Mr Dodik, barred from office last year after a conviction for defying the international envoy overseeing the Dayton agreement, claims his party and its partners have two-thirds of the Republika Srpska assembly. Turnout fell about eight points to 42%.
He was not on the ballot and it has made no difference. “No one should ask us to change our politics,” Mr Dodik told a news conference late on Sunday, crediting Donald Trump’s “magnificent victory” in 2024 and Vladimir Putin’s support, and adding: “I cannot believe that we smashed it like this.” At his final rally in Banja Luka on Friday, attended by the Russian ambassador, he told supporters that Bosnia “is dead” and “an impossible country” that “doesn’t make any sense”. The analyst Dragan Bursać put the lesson plainly: Mr Dodik “is still in command. He is everywhere. It is obvious that these measures to ban him from political life are not working, and he is using them.” A two-thirds assembly majority is the number that matters, because it is the threshold at which secession steps stop being rhetoric and become legislation. The other two seats went the other way: Darijana Filipović of the Croatian Democratic Union led commandingly, and the incumbent Bosniak member Denis Bećirović led Bakir Izetbegović by fewer than three points. Of about 3.4 million eligible voters, 1,432,269 cast a ballot. The war that ended in 1995 killed more than 100,000 people. Watch for a response from Brussels or the Office of the High Representative, which had not come by this morning.