Eurasia Press & News
After a 12-year gap caused by an ethnically-driven political dispute, municipal elections were finally held in the divided city of Mostar, but they failed to deliver the expected shift away from the main Bosniak and Croat ethnic parties.
The first, partial results of Sunday’s local elections still offer no clear indications as to who will be forming the new local government in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s south-western city of Mostar, famous for its Old Bridge and infamous for its vicious fighting during the country’s 1992-95 war, as well as for its post-war ethnic divisions.
All main political actors have already declared election victories and claimed the position of mayor for themselves. Yet experts stress that Mostar’s complex electoral and governance system will require a few more days just to complete the counting of seats in the new city council.
The instalment of a new mayor and a new city government may take weeks or even months. Yet even the partial results showed that the elections have failed to bring about the major political shift that some voters and activists had expected.
Apart from solid results for two new local political actors, the ballot clearly confirmed the continued domination of the two ethnic parties that ruled Mostar during the war and afterwards – the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, and mostly Bosniak Party of Democratic Action, SDA.
“I thought that we would give a chance to younger, more literate people,” an obviously disappointed 40-year-old voter called Zana told BIRN. “It turned out that nothing can be changed here.”
Many Mostar residents appeared resigned and apathetic about possible changes even before the local elections. This sombre mood was mainly a result of the protracted political crisis that has held the city – and the rest of the country – hostage for years.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has only made the situation worse, revealing the extent of the dysfunctionality and corruption of Bosnia’s governance system, and ineffectiveness of the healthcare system and other public services.
The election blues in Mostar are striking, given that this was the first time since 2008 that people were able to vote in a local election.
But few Mostar residents seemed impressed with the breakthrough, mostly because they said that most of the parties suffer from similar maladies – corruption, egoism and lack of accountability.
Majda, a 35-year-old clerk, compared the choice in the election with a bad night out. “It’s like when you go to the cinema and every film on offer makes you sick,” she said.
From symbol of unity to epitome of division
For centuries, Mostar drew travellers from far and wide. Straddling a key road running from the Adriatic coast to the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and further north, the city was one of the main trade and business centres in the region, also famous for its Old Town and particularly for the magnificent 16th-century Ottoman Old Bridge.
In the late 1980s, just before the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, Mostar and the northern Croatian town of Vukovar were both cited as examples of Yugoslavia’s multi-ethnic harmony.
In each, some 70 per cent of weddings involved ethnically mixed couples. A few years later, both towns epitomised wartime destruction and ethnic division.
In 1995, Mostar emerged from the Bosnian war a divided city. Most Bosnian Serbs had fled and only a small portion have since returned.
Catholic Bosnian Croats now controlled the western part of the city, while Bosniak Muslims dominated the east.
Since then, the ruling Bosniak and Croat parties, the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, and Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, have controlled their respective sides of the city.
Most of the Old Town was badly damaged in the fighting, while the famous Old Bridge, which connected the two banks of the Neretva river for more than four centuries, was destroyed by Bosnian Croat shelling in 1993.
Ethnic and political tensions ran high in Mostar after the war, prompting the international overseers of the Bosnian peace agreement to give it special status, and special arrangements for its local governance.
A German, Hans Koschnick, the European administrator of Mostar in 1994 and 1995, imposed the Interim Statute of the City of Mostar, which divided it into six municipalities instead of two in the war – three mainly Bosnian Croat and three mainly Bosniak.
Statute solves some problems – and creates new ones
The international community invested heavily in the restoration of Mostar, including its Old Bridge, using the same designs and materials as the original architects.
The new Old bridge was reopened in July 2004 with a high-level event attended by numerous regional and international dignitaries. The bridge and the surrounding reconstructed Old Town were added to UNESCO’s list of world heritage sites a year later.
Also in 2004, Bosnia’s then High Representative, Britain’s Paddy Ashdown, imposed a new statute, establishing a single municipality, as it was before the war. The six municipalities were abolished, but retained as electoral districts.
The next elections, in 2008, were held in line with this statute. However, only two years later, Bosnia’s Constitutional Court annulled these election rules, acting on an appeal from Bosnian Croat councillors on the city council.
They argued that it was unfair for Bosniak constituencies, with far fewer voters than Croat ones, to elect an equal number of councillors to the council.
After the state parliament failed to amend the election law, the Constitutional Court removed the problematic part of the law, thus rendering it impossible to hold local elections in Mostar.
After the mandate of the Mostar City Council expired in 2012, the city was left without a legislative body. Since then, its administration has been managed through the executive powers of the mayor, Ljubo Beslic from the HDZ.
This situation has affected the functioning of the city administration, but also led to non-transparent operations, leading to a number of criminal charges and scandals involving tens of millions of euro spent without proper documentation.
ECHR ruling breaks the deadlock
The political deadlock over Mostar eventually ended thanks to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, after Mostar resident Irma Baralija filed an appeal against Bosnia and Herzegovina for not allowing her to use her right to vote in local elections.
In 2019, the ECHR ruled in her favour and ordered Bosnia’s parliament to amend the election law. If parliament failed to implement its ruling, the ECFR said Bosnia’s Constitutional Court should impose a decision to fix the problem.
Faced with growing pressure from the US and EU, and the possible loss of control over the process if a decision was imposed by the Constitutional Court, the leaders of the SDA and HDZ, Bakir Izetbegovic and Dragan Covic, finally reached an agreement on Mostar on June 17.
This opened the door for the state parliament to adopt amendments to the election law that enabled the Central Election Commission, CIK, to hold local elections in Mostar for the first time in 12 years.
The decision came too late for Mostar to be included in the local elections in the rest of the country on November 15. Instead, the ballot took place on December 20.
According to the CIK, 38 political parties and nine independent candidates applied to run in the elections, competing for 35 seats on the council.
Under the special election rules for Mostar, none of the three main ethnic communities can have more than 15 seats, or fewer than four. One more seat is reserved for “others” who refuse to define themselves in ethnic terms.
New elections, but same old choices
The elections failed to end the domination of the two main blocs – the HDZ and a coalition of five mostly Bosniak parties led by the SDA, called the Coalition for Mostar 2020.
The CIK announced on Monday that the election turnout was 55 per cent – just some five percent more than in the last month’s local ballot held in the rest of Bosnia.
The head of the SDA’s local chapter in Mostar, Salem Maric, told local media on Monday that no one can know which party will get how many seats in the council until the CIK validates the results. “Only then will space open up for further political dialogue,” Maric said.
On the other side, the president of the HDZ, Dragan Covic, sent a letter to Western ambassadors in Bosnia, claiming that his party was robbed of a number of votes through election fraud that he claimed took place in the second half of election day and over the night that followed.
The CIK, as well as the independent election observers’ coalition Pod Lupom, stated however that the elections went relatively well and without any major incidents.
Later on Monday, the CIK did order recounts in some 70 out of 150 polling stations in Mostar, but officials told BIRN it was because of what appeared to be minor inconsistencies and technicalities.
Due to Mostar’s particularly complex electoral system, the CIK was still unable to provide any estimates about the distribution of seats in the new city council.
However, most parties calculated that on the new council, the HDZ may have up to 13 seats, the SDA-run coalition 12, the liberal BH bloc (made up of the Social Democratic Party and Nasa Stranka) five or six; the Croat Republican Party HRS three, and the joint Serb list one or two seats.
The BH bloc, the HRS and the joint Serb list celebrated their results, given the fact that these was their first local elections in Mostar. Nevertheless, many locals and experts expressed disappointment with the fact that the next city council and Mostar government will be dominated again by the HDZ and SDA.
Both the HDZ and SDA-led blocs have a chance of claiming the position of mayor. The 35-member council needs a two-thirds majority to elect a mayor if a decision is reached in the initial vote or in a second attempt. If no candidate is chosen in the second vote, there is a third round in which the mayor is elected by a simple majority of councillors who are present.
A two-thirds majority is needed for any other key decisions in the council. This means that all the main parties will have to be involved in the ruling coalition, one way or the other, if they want the new city administration to function.
This, in turn, suggests the continued dominance of the HDZ and SDA – a perspective which for many Mostar residents bodes ill for the future of their city.
“The HDZ and SDA will again reach an agreement, and that is the end of the story,” a Mostar resident called Marko told BIRN.
Dzevad, a 33-year-old unemployed resident of the city, was even more pessimistic.
“There is no investment, no strategy, no plans, nothing,” he said. With the current political actors in the city, he added, ordinary people feel “left without any voice”.
