Bosnia: Eternal disappointment

When the preliminary results of Bosnia's 5 October local elections were made public, the international community - particularly nongovernmental organizations and think-tanks - made no secret of their dissatisfaction and disappointment with the way the majority of Bosnians voted. Still, it was all easily predictable: The nationalists win the vote every time and no lessons are ever learned.

NGOs had attempted to persuade Bosnian voters to stray from the nationalist parties - parties with no economic program and which have only served to reverse any potential progress the country might have made toward EU integration.

Indeed, in its 2008 corruption report, Transparency International (TI) noted that Bosnia and Herzegovina was the most corrupt nation in the western Balkans and rated 92nd most corrupt among 180 nations surveyed.

The 5 October local elections followed one of the most pathetic campaigns in the country to date. Parties offered no solution to political and economic crises and relied solely on attacking their rivals. And the electorate, for its part, proved once again that it prefers to vote for sure winners, platform or no, and paid little attention to the fact that none of the parties had much at all to say beyond their less-than-clever slogans.

The elections confirmed deep ethnic divisions, with three ethnic nationalist parties consolidating power on their ethnic majority territory.

More than three million Bosnians were eligible to vote, while the turnout was 55 percent, higher than in the previous local elections in 2004. However, it seems that better-educated voters in the larger cities largely boycotted the poll, rejecting the predominantly nationalist rhetoric, with turnout in the four largest cities under 40 percent. But in rural areas, voters turned out in big numbers, helping the nationalists to gain ground. This was largely the case in the Bosnian Serb-dominated entity, Republika Srpska, where around 30 percent of the population has only a primary-level education.

The turnout in the capital Sarajevo was less than 40 percent, with a similar trend in the towns of Tuzla and Zenica in the Bosniak-Croat dominated Federation entity and Banja Luka in Republika Srpska.

Three main nationalist parties - the Bosniak Party of Democratic Action (SDA), Croat Democratic Union (HDZ) and Bosnian Serb Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) - gained ground since 2006 national elections, though they failed to make good on a single promise made during that campaign.

The three parties swept the majority of the country's 149 municipalities following a campaign marked by nationalist rhetoric and little more. Furthermore, the three parties won only in the areas where their ethnic group is the majority.

The campaign focused on the same ethnic-based issues used since the first post-war elections in 1996. All the Bosnian cities, towns and roads were covered with amateurish billboards portraying the smiling faces of politicians and a slogan, which often had a double meaning or a direct ethnic slant. Thus, SNSD campaigned on the slogan "My Serb House"; "Together We Are Keys For Goods, and a Lock for bad Things" (SDA); "Let's Finish What We Started" (HDZ); "Choose Ours" (HDZ); "100 Europe" (SBiH); etc. 

Sarajevo-based think tank ACIPS conducted a survey days prior to the elections analyzing the campaign speeches and slogans. The survey concluded that the campaign was marked by widespread nationalistic rhetoric and an almost absolute neglect for issues of local interest.

Out of 5,000 statements given by members of political parties during the campaign, 74 percent dealt with general issues, such as the country's constitution, the census or European integration - none of which have anything to do with municipal elections. In only 2 percent of public statements did politicians offer concrete programs for improving their communities.

The main Bosnian Serb party, the SNSD, doubled the number of mayoral seats it held since the last election, and now it controls half of the municipalities in the entity of Republika Srpska.

As such, the elections confirmed the power of Republika Srpska's prime minister and master public relations spinner, SNSD leader Milorad Dodik. It is expected that he will now leave the coalition with two other parties he needed before, parties that have often criticized him for corruption.

However, the SNSD unexpectedly lost the election in several Republika Srpska cities to the nationalist Serb Democratic Party (SDS), founded by war criminal Radovan Karadzic. This was not because the SDS offered a better or more coherent program to undereducated voters. Rather, it was because Dodik's government had undertaken a series of bad privatization deals in the cities of Doboj and Bijeljina, jeopardizing hundreds of jobs.

Dodik, until two years ago a proclaimed moderate politician, this year launched the most aggressive campaign to date, calling for the secession of Republika Srpska from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the transferal of some state powers to the entities. He won much support for this among Bosnian Serbs by persuading them that recent attempts to merge the country's separate authorities would mean the final suspension of the Bosnian Serb entity.

However, it seems that this nationalist rhetoric did not as well work in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Here, the nationalist HDZ and SDA beat out the even more nationalist HDZ-1990 and the Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina (SBiH), who launched similar campaigns as that of the Bosnian Serb SNSD.

HDZ-1990 called for further carving up of the country into a third, Bosnian Croat-dominated entity and for the creation of the public broadcaster in the Croatian language. HDZ, though also known for its nationalist rhetoric, stood against these radical calls, fearing possible sanctions from the international community. Still, HDZ won most of the votes in the municipalities dominated by Bosnian Croats.

In the municipalities where Bosniaks are the majority, the biggest loser was the SBiH, a party which never has won an election but always has managed to govern. Most of the Bosniak vote went to the SDA. The SBiH repeated its 2006 election campaign, when its leader Haris Silajdzic, who also chairs the country's tripartite presidency, lobbied hard against the Serb Republic, which he says was "founded on genocide." In 2006, this type of campaigning worked with the Bosniak electorate, and SBiH was duly rewarded. However, on 5 October this year, the response was different, and SBiH won only four mayoral seats.

Still, though some observers may recognize that it is preferable for voters to choose the nationalist SDA and HDZ over the more nationalist rhetoric of HDZ-1990 and SBiH, this apparent improvement in voter decision-making is worth little. The SDA and HDZ have done nothing for Bosnia other than to reverse any gains. In fact, under their leadership and catastrophic economic policy, the country was brought to its knees by bankruptcy this year.

With this trend of campaigning and voting, it is possible that the next 2010 elections will bring more ethnic divisions; that Bosnian Serb parties will further neglect campaigning in the Federation while Federal parties will do the same in Republika Srpska. It is also expected that nationalist parties will continue to use their tried-and-true ethnic-biased campaign rhetoric, focusing on the rural and uneducated voters, which in turn will lead to a stronger boycott by educated, urban voters. Some analysts believe that if this trend continues, the parliamentary election in 2010 "will be an ethnic census of the population."