ZAGREB, April 26, 2018 – The leaders of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Croat HDZ BiH party and political parties that have a predominantly Bosniak membership met again in Sarajevo on Wednesday in an attempt to agree last-minute changes to the election law, but the meeting ended inconclusively.
HDZ BiH officials and officials of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), Democratic Front (DF), Social Democratic Party (SDP BiH) and the Alliance for a Better Future discussed changes to the election law with US Ambassador Maureen Cormack and the head of the EU Delegation in the country Lars-Gunnar Wigemark acting as mediators.
SDA leader Bakir Izetbegović was the first to leave the meeting at the US ambassador’s residence after an hour and a half, without offering reporters any explanation as to why he did it. HDZ BiH leader Dragan Ćović, too, just rushed by reporters without comment.
A member of the SDA leadership Šefik Džaferović explained that nothing new had happened in relation to previous failed talks and that all sides insisted on their mutually opposed positions. “There has been no progress but we have agreed to continue the talks on May 3 at the level of party presidents,” he said.
Senior SDP BiH official Zukan Helez said that he was a pessimist and that one should not expect anything of the May 3 meeting. “Now that I have seen all the positions, especially the HDZ’s, I’m a pessimist,” said Helez, accusing Ćović of “insisting on further dividing Bosnia and Herzegovina along ethnic lines,” which, he said, the SDP would never allow.
DF leader Željko Komšić said that the Constitutional Court ruling was clear and showed which way to go. In an evident allusion to the HDZ’s position, Komšić said that now “the story is being expanded” with proposals for the amendment of the constitution, which additionally complicated the situation.
Talks on changes to the Bosnian election law are being held after the Constitutional Court in 2016 ruled on a complaint by Croat official Božo Ljubić, concluding that provisions of the election law regulating the election of deputies to the House of Peoples of the Croat-Bosniak Federation entity’s parliament were unconstitutional.
The House of Peoples is the upper house of the entity parliament without which it is impossible to form the entity government and which also elects Croat and Bosniak deputies to the House of Peoples of the national parliament which confirms all laws adopted by the parliament’s lower house, the House of Representatives.
Talks on a new model to elect deputies to the Federation House of Peoples have been going on without success for more than a year and a half but the HDZ BiH insists that, along with that model, a new model for the election of the Croat and Bosniak members of the collective state presidency should also be defined, proposing to that end the establishment of ad hoc constituencies that would group voters in the Federation along ethnic lines.
General elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina are expected to be held on October 7 and the Central Election Commission is expected to call them by May 6, which is considered to be the final deadline for changes to the election law.
