Bosnia nationalists cement hold

Low turnout by urban voters in local elections hands victory to populist hardliners

Officials of Bosnia’s election commission count ballots yesterday, a day after the local elections. Bosnian Serbs, Muslims and Croats voted mostly along ethnic party lines.

By Daria Sito-Sucic - Reuters

SARAJEVO - The low turnout by urban voters who back multiethnic parties handed victory in Sunday's Bosnian local polls to the same nationalist groups that have dominated political life for the past 13 years, analysts said yesterday.

A similar voting pattern in parliamentary elections in 2010 would keep Bosnia, split between two regions and three ethnic groups, in the grip of the divisive political parties and programs that emerged from the 1992-95 Bosnia war, they said.

«If this trend continues, the parliamentary election in 2010 will be an ethnic census of the population,» said Asim Mujkic, a political science professor at Sarajevo University.

Bosnian Serbs, Muslims and Croats voted for the largest ethnic parties in the two autonomous regions created after the war and in neutral Brcko district, preliminary results showed. Political leaders exploited the ethnic mind-set created after the war, said Banja Luka-based political analyst Tanja Topic. «This is especially the case in the Serb Republic, where about 30 percent of the population only completed primary school.» The turnout was 55 percent of the 3 million or so people registered to vote for city councils and mayors.

Rural and small-town voters turned out in large numbers but many urban voters abstained, tired of the nationalist rhetoric and lack of fresh ideas, analysts said. The biggest victory was scored by the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) of Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, which swept to power in a parliamentary election in Bosnia's Serb Republic in 2006.

The SNSD more than tripled its number of mayors, winning 41 or two-thirds of mayoral posts in the Serb Republic, according to incomplete results. «We totally defeated our political opponents,» Dodik said after voting closed.

In the Muslim Croat federation, the main Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA) won the biggest number of mayoral posts, improving on its 2004 local election results. In Croat areas of the federation, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) confirmed its dominance in 16 Croat-held towns. The multiethnic Social Democratic Party (SDP) kept nine mayoral posts in several towns, including two Sarajevo municipalities.

«Our people like to vote for sure winners,» said Banja Luka-based civic activist Aleksandar Trifunovic. «They know their favorites even before the campaign began.»

«I take it as a sign of continued indifference on the part of more educated voters,» a senior foreign diplomat said.