'Bosnia is dead': Dodik's parting shot as Bosnians vote in the world's most complicated election

Sarajevo: Bosnians voted on Sunday in one of the world's most complicated general elections, a day after Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik declared the country "dead" at his final campaign rally. "Bosnia and Herzegovina is dead; it is an impossible country," Dodik, the former president of Republika Srpska, told the closing rally of his right-wing Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) in the entity's capital Banja Luka late on Friday. Bosnia's labyrinthine governing institutions were created by the United States-brokered Dayton peace agreement of 1995, designed to manage the ethnic divisions between Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats that fuelled the 1992-95 war. Three decades on, the same divisions dominated the campaign. In the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosniak parties pushed for a stronger central state, with incumbent Bosniak presidency member Denis Becirovic pledging a renewed path to the EU and NATO. The EU granted Bosnia candidate status in December 2022, but accession negotiations scheduled for 2024 were delayed after Brussels demanded stronger anticorruption laws and judicial reform. Croat nationalist parties, meanwhile, pressed for electoral reform, demanding a greater say in choosing the Croat member of the three-person presidency in the entity they share with the more numerous Bosniaks. The campaign's relentless focus on war-era rhetoric and division frustrated many voters. "I don't think these new elections in Bosnia will change anything," 34-year-old activist Adi Selman of the Karton Revolucija protest group told AFP in the northern town of Tuzla. "The choice is limited to political parties that have already been around for 30 years and basically pick up votes by harping on about war, tensions, divisions and the past." Polling stations reported steady voting on Sunday, with voters feeding paper ballots into optical scanners in Sarajevo and beyond. Dodik's declaration may be campaign theatre, or it may be a promise. Either way, millions of Bosnians went to the polls in a country its own most powerful Serb politician says no longer exists.