Legal expert Ognjen Tadić analyzed the general elections held in Republika Srpska and Bosnia and Herzegovina in an op-ed.
We publish his text in full:
In the General Elections in BiH, the constituent peoples also settled accounts with the distorted role of the OHR to date, the rule of ambassadors and the legacy of usurper Christian Schmidt.
On one side, defeated, were their political friends, allies and domestic and foreign glorifiers of Schmidt’s failed usurping mission, while on the other, as winners, stood all those who openly opposed them.
To make the absurdity even greater, the winners’ victory is all the sweeter because it was verified by new election technologies introduced precisely at the behest of the tragic Christian Schmidt.
First election impression: Defeat of Schmidt’s troikas
Following Schmidt’s expulsion, those who had relied on his power were left to face voters on their own — unsuccessfully.
The Troika from political Sarajevo failed to achieve either its planned political or electoral objectives.
The opposition troika from Republika Srpska, which hosted Schmidt, cooperated with him and counted on political pressure from abroad — something Schmidt himself spoke about publicly and quite unequivocally — also failed to achieve the turnaround it had hoped for. And not only the turnaround. One of those parties even failed to pass the electoral threshold.
Second election impression: The OHR is unnecessary and obsolete
The elections were held in complete peace, under the control of domestic institutions and without a single incident.
Following the elections, no serious political actor expects a foreigner, rather than the election winners, to form the government.
This represents an enormous change compared with the 2022 elections, after which Schmidt managed to place himself above the institutions of the Federation of BiH and spent four years unsuccessfully attempting to place himself above the institutions of Republika Srpska.
Today, the OHR is locked and, evidently, nothing tragic has happened as a result. The institutions have not disappeared. Dayton has not collapsed. No vacuum has opened that urgently needs to be filled by a new international administrator.
Although for decades we were told that maintaining peace and stability was impossible without the OHR, the time has come to say that, even without a High Representative, life goes on.
Third election impression: Absolutely undisputed legitimacy of Republika Srpska’s policy and a 2–1 majority in the BiH Presidency
Schmidt’s election experiment with scanners proved highly unpleasant for political Sarajevo.
Despite the expectations of Schmidt’s allies and associates, it became clear that while a scanner can scan a ballot, register a vote and speed up data processing, it cannot manufacture the political will projected by ambassadors.
In Republika Srpska, this resulted in elections after which, for the first time, no one is claiming that the election was stolen. This is significant for the undisputed legality and authentic legitimacy of the authorities in the political processes to come.
In the Federation of BiH, it resulted in the election of HDZ’s Darijana Filipović as the Croat member of the BiH Presidency, which had been political Sarajevo’s pre-election nightmare. It appears that the scanners themselves prevented fraudulent ballots bearing the name of a pro-Sarajevo Croat candidate from being inserted at polling stations controlled by political Sarajevo.
The outcome was best illustrated by a columnist from political Sarajevo, who said that Bećirović would be able to outvote Cvijanović and Filipović only if he were allowed to vote using both hands and at least one foot.
Schmidt’s “integrity technology” thus acquired a particularly ironic dimension. He imposed it in order to harm his opponents, under the pretext of providing a clearer view of what was inside the ballot box.
And indeed, it became clear.
Fourth election impression: Elections as a referendum on foreign tutelage
It was not only the Troika from political Sarajevo and the opposition in Republika Srpska that were defeated in the elections. Among the defeated are also actors from the United Kingdom, Germany and a number of other countries who believed they were powerful enough to wrest the OHR from the hands of the UN Security Council and thereby permanently take control of an instrument for governing BiH.
They envisioned Schmidt as an instrument for establishing their sovereign power, despite having no basis for such a role either in the Dayton Peace Agreement or in any other document. The culmination of that process was supposed to be an election result that would install loyal authorities in Banja Luka and Sarajevo — authorities that would not ask uncomfortable questions about the legality and justification of such domination.
Contrary to those plans, Schmidt left behind a political landscape in which both the representatives of those countries and their domestic allies have been devastated, lost their authority and suffered defeat at the ballot box.
That fact gives these elections the significance of a referendum.
Now, finally, on the basis of the unequivocally expressed will of voters, which no one can call into question, it can be clearly stated that the constituent peoples in BiH believe that the foreign factor has definitively exhausted its previous political capital and that, despite everything we have experienced and witnessed so far, power belongs to the constituent peoples.
Anyone who does not believe it should look at the geographical map of the election results.
Source: RTRS
