The recently concluded fifteenth overall and eighth local elections in BiH since the end of the war have not brought about a significant turning point. As a society, we have still not managed to cross the civilizational threshold implied by the phrase – fair and honest elections. Were there at least minimal steps in that direction? Well, although there were, they were difficult to notice, but if it’s any consolation, at least there was no deterioration.
It is common knowledge that for years, the ruling political parties have not been willing to take even the smallest step to improve the legal framework and, consequently, the practices that would lead to improved electoral integrity.
This situation led to the High Representative, who, by the way, no one understands what he does anymore, imposing amendments to the BiH Election Law in March 2024, aimed at improving the almost
Now, as it often happens, the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. That’s somewhat what happened this time. The first and fundamental problem is the fact that even after thirty years, an unelected authority is imposing laws, and changes to electoral rules during an election year at that.
But let’s see, since he has imposed them, whether there were any positive effects and why not.
As expected, such imposed amendments could not actually have any positive effects; on the contrary, they seem to have had quite undesirable effects.
First, no positive changes occurred with the imposed amendments that were aimed at prescribing the appointment of non-partisan presidents and vice-presidents of polling station committees. Given that the changes were imposed in an election year, it was simply not realistically possible to do this in such a short time. So, hundreds or thousands of party representatives managed the work of polling station committees for these elections.
Once again, it was shown that the possibility for challengers to achieve victories over the ruling parties remained almost at the level of an incident, as illustrated by the election results where this happened in only about 10% of cases or local self-government units. Regardless of the results achieved, and what (mis)deeds were committed, the advantage is almost insurmountable on the side of the ruling parties. For example, the current mayor of Trnovo won a new mandate from detention, and the mayor of Banja Luka, who literally turned Banja Luka into his playground, while breaking laws on a daily basis, also won a new mandate.
This actually means that the dominant model of voter mobilization remains clientelism and cronyism. What is known in theoretical considerations as competitive authoritarianism – in this case at the micro level, the local self-government unit – means that formally there is competition in elections, but in practice, the position of the ruling parties is privileged to such an extent that the elections are actually not even remotely fair. Because the ruling parties allocate and distribute jobs, subsidies, public procurements, and other budget benefits.
The imposed amendments to the election law have actually contributed to narrowing the possibilities for true electoral competitiveness. Although official campaigning and its sanctioning are prescribed by law, and the misuse of resources by those in power is prohibited, the insufficiently precise way in which these provisions are formulated left the CEC enough room to hide behind them its lack of will and readiness to really deal with this phenomenon, so in practice there was almost no sanctioning of this type of abuse.
This is well demonstrated by TI BiH monitoring data which found that authorities in the pre-election period distributed about 59 million KM through one-time assistance to pensioners and other categories, which is also prohibited by law but of course was not sanctioned.
TI BiH recorded 769 examples of pre-election works worth 599 million KM, and 350 events organized by public institutions attended by election candidates, which certainly represents a manifestation of official campaigning.
As the unfortunate CEC refused to sanction such behavior, TI BiH requested an authentic interpretation of the imposed provisions of the Election Law from the OHR, which the OHR of course refused, stating that it is within the jurisdiction of the CEC.
On the other hand, cases of premature campaigning that were harshly sanctioned under the expanded legal basis by the imposed amendments actually significantly limited the possibility of campaigning for challengers, which the ruling parties skillfully used and through practically unsanctioned official campaigning made the electoral race additionally unfair.
Of course, it was not to be expected that an act of self-will by a disoriented German diplomat with, by all accounts, a messianic syndrome, would solve our deeply rooted structural problems.
These problems will have to be solved by those who are responsible for their emergence: ourselves.
