More than a month has passed since High Representative Christian Schmidt started the process of imposing changes to the Election Law and the Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH).
From everything that has come to the public recently, parts of the prepared decision, publicly expressed views, lack of transparency in communication with the public, ignoring the earlier opinion of the legal team of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the nervousness it shows every day, it seems that the assessments of numerous officials from BiH are that Schmidt is trying to fulfill the essence of the political goals of the Croatian Democratic Union and official Zagreb.
With the original intention of introducing a 3 percent threshold when electing delegates to the House of Peoples of the FBiH, he imposed a framework in which a solution can be made, essentially, that the peoples ultimately, and not all citizens, elect delegates to the House of Peoples of the FBiH. In such a framework, any solution for Sarajevo represents a political defeat, because it turns the people into constituencies.
According to this proposal, cantons in which one constituent nation makes up less than three percent of the members of that nation in the FBiH would not be able to elect delegates from that constituent nation.
Undoubtedly, the High Representative is trying to present his intentions with a compromise solution that will supposedly balance and satisfy the various interests of political factors in BiH, but this is far from what it looks like in reality.
Paradoxically, Schmidt “liked” a part of the original Constitution of the FBiH, which he ignored with the proposed 3 percent census, which determined that the support of half of each constituent caucus in the House of Peoples of the FBiH (15 out of 30) was required in order to propose candidates for the presidency and vice president of FBiH.
During the interview, when asked why his views contradict the opinion of Valentin Inzko that the verdict “Ljubic” was carried out and the opinion of the OHR legal team from 2016 and 2018, Schmidt said that this is not true.
However, this is far from reality, which is clear even from a cursory reading of the OHR opinion.
”It is precisely the need to ensure the representation of the cantons, as well as the need for the cantons to continue to be a key element of the power-sharing arrangement agreed upon in the Washington Agreement, that led to the adoption of different solutions for the FBiH and the Republika Srpska (RS). The establishment of a People’s Council with a mandate limited to matters of vital national interest reflects the fact that territorial representation was not considered problematic in the centralized structure of RS as it was in the Federation. Accordingly, recognizing that the FBiH House of Peoples has no other purpose than to represent the constituent peoples would lead to the conclusion that its mandate should be significantly limited or that the cantons should no longer play a role in electing delegates to the FBiH House of Peoples,” it is stated in the submission of the OHR submitted to the Constitutional Court of BiH in 2018.
Despite this, with Schmidt’s proposal, the powers of the FBiH House of Peoples would remain almost identical, with cosmetic changes that should hide the essence of the decision.
When under the pressure of political protests and part of the public, he abandoned the plan to impose changes to the FBiH Constitution and the Election Law and gave party representatives a deadline to come to an agreement. However, with the original proposal, he only further strengthened the position of HDZ and Zagreb, so it is unclear why Dragan Covic would negotiate at all if Schmidt’s proposal fully suits him.
Nevertheless, Schmidt said that he was giving up on the introduction of the census, saying that he would go the other way. In this regard, everything reminds us of the negotiations that were coordinated by Matthew Palmer and Angelina Eichhorst months ago, where Covic, and now Schmidt, proposed different models of changes to the Election Law, but which ultimately bring the same result.
Today, we are witnessing new consultations of party representatives and the OHR, who once again, completely non-transparently as if we live in a totalitarian system, are keeping the most important details away from the public eye, even though the essence of political relations in the country is changing, Klix.ba writes.
E.Dz.
