Bosnian Nationalists Unlikely to Hold Majorities

The international organizers of this month’s Bosnian elections said Tuesday that the three main nationalist parties would not be able to form majority governments, based on final preliminary results.

In the Nov. 11 balloting, voters in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s two ministates--the Bosnian Serb republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation--elected members of a federal parliament.

Voters in the Muslim-Croat Federation also chose regional officials and a federation parliament. Bosnian Serbs voted for a president and vice president of their state and members of their own local parliament.

“If you define the nationalist parties as primarily SDA [the Muslim-based Party for Democratic Action], SDS [the Serbian Democratic Party] and HDZ [the Croatian Democratic Union], I think you can say that that is not the case, at least in terms of them commanding absolute majorities in any of the bodies,” said Luke Zahner, spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, which organized and supervised the elections.

The Serbian, Croatian and Muslim nationalist parties that dominated the Balkan country’s politics for a decade all scored well despite Western hopes that Bosnians would copy democratic changes in neighboring Croatia and Yugoslavia.

Figures released Tuesday show that the nationalist SDS formed by indicted war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic was the single largest party in the Bosnian Serb republic, with 36% of the vote.

However, its candidate for the entity’s presidency, Mirko Sarovic, appeared to have won just less than 50% of the votes in the first round.

In the Muslim-Croat Federation, the nationalist HDZ came in third overall but was the leading party in five out of 10 cantons.