Elected officials are responsible for the timely formation of the government in order to ensure stability, the US Embassy said on Monday in response to a statement made by the leader of the Bosnian Croat party who conditioned the formation of the government with changes in the election law.
Vecernji List daily on Monday published an interview with the leader of the main Bosnian Croat political party in the country, the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), Dragan Covic, in which he said that “(new) election law is the absolute condition for the formation of the government.”
“Although it is necessary to solve the problems that the Election Law of Bosnia and Herzegovina contains, keeping the future of this country hostage in order to achieve political interests is irresponsible and unfair toward the citizens, including Croats in Bosnia,” the US Embassy told the Patria news agency in response to Covic’s comment.
“Instead, political parties should work within the established political framework to further their goals in a spirit of compromise,” the embassy said.
Covic made the statement after a meeting with top officials of his party, where he touched upon the election of Zeljko Komsic to the post of the Croat member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency.
Bosnia’s presidency is composed of three members, each representing one of the three majority ethnic groups living in the country – Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.
The country is also composed of two territorial and political semi-autonomous entities, the Bosnian Serb-majority Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation (FBiH), shared by Croats and Bosniaks.
While the Serb Presidency member is elected from the RS, the Bosniak and Croat members are elected from the FBiH.
However, since there are many more Bosniaks than Croats in the Federation, Bosnian Croat nationalist parties have been complaining that Bosniak voters are able to elect the Bosnian Croat Presidency member. They said that this has already happened twice before, and that it happened again in Sunday’s general election, when Komsic won.
HDZ continued to claim that Komsic is not a legitimate representative of Bosnian Croats. At the HDZ meeting on Monday, Covic said that never again will one ethnic group elect the representatives for another one at any government level.
The HDZ and their leader are demanding changes to the election law that would prevent this, but civic-oriented and Bosniak parties oppose this, calling the proposal discriminatory, and that any voter should be able to vote for any candidate.
Although the current election law was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court in 2016, top political parties in Bosnia never managed to find a compromise on how to change it. The international community tried to mediate negotiations between political representatives in the country throughout the past year, but to no avail, the US Embassy said.
“Still it is of key importance for partners in Bosnia and Herzegovina to find a solution in accordance with European and democratic norms which ensure political equality of the three constituent peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the equality of all citizens, including those who do not identify as members of a constituent group,” the Embassy said.
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