Bosnia holds general election amid ethnic tensions and secessionist concerns

Voters across Bosnia and Herzegovina went to the polls to elect the three members of the state presidency and the 42 seats of the House of Representatives. Concurrent elections were held for the 98-seat Federation parliament and, in Republika Srpska, for the entity's president and its 83-seat assembly.

The election is widely regarded as a test of the fragile power-sharing system established by the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which divided the country along ethnic lines between Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. The most closely watched contest was for the rotating tripartite presidency, which represents all three ethnic groups.

Milorad Dodik, the former president of Republika Srpska, declared that his party had retained power in the entity and kept its seat on the joint presidency. This claim came despite preliminary results indicating a decline in overall voter turnout. Dodik himself was not on the ballot, as he was convicted of overstepping his constitutional powers and barred from holding the presidency for six years.

Addressing supporters in Banja Luka, Dodik credited the political climate created by Donald Trump's re-election for his party's success. He told the crowd that without this international development, his party "would probably be political corpses today" and expressed gratitude to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a close ally. Dodik's Serb nationalist party campaigned on a platform of greater autonomy for Republika Srpska and secessionist rhetoric, raising concerns about the stability of Bosnia's post-war constitutional order.