President of HDZ BiH and Croatian member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Dragan Covic today took over the duty of a Chairman of the Presidency of BiH that he will perform during the next 8 months, and on that occasion he talked about the Election Law, crisis in the government, relations with our neighboring countries and the European path.
“The amendments that followed in the electoral legislation by the fact that the Constitutional Court withdrew disputed articles from the Election Law, in which was defined the role of the Central Electoral Commission that no longer exists, created a huge problem. My task, in which I will succeed, is to change the Election Law and avoid the possibility for someone to challenge the elections. The elections will be held, as planned, on the first weekend in the October of the next year,” said Dragan Covic.
According to him, a lot of effort has to be invested in order to adopt the changes to the Election Law.
“They may not be thorough and in detail in some other things, but they will be enough for the elections in 2018 so that the elections can be held in accordance with the Constitution and the law,” he said.
When it comes to priorities during his chairmanship, the Chairman of the Presidency of BiH Covic particularly noted the European path. He will attend a meeting with the President of the European Council Donald Tusk and some other European officials today in Brussels, as he will also have a meeting with Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, on Tuesday.
“With this, we send a clear message of the European BiH. We need to get MAP by the end of this year, and not just to talk about it. It is extremely important because it is connected with the NATO alliance as one of the phases in the process. The second is the candidate status for the EU. That status must be achieved before the elections in 2018. I was sure that we will achieve this by the end of this year, but we lost too much time, around 12-13 months, because we are in the process of trying to establish a functional parliamentary majority that is not working for a quite some time now,” said Covic.
When it comes to relations with neighboring countries, the goal is to achieve much better relations than those in the last year or year and a half. There are no open issues with Montenegro, and when it comes to Croatia and Serbia, there were certain problems in the communication, and whether we wanted it or not, they reflected on BiH as well.
He also noted the mutual interconnectedness of countries and their conditioning of one another. Infrastructure is very important and many legal issues are related to economic issues. According to him, that is not just the issue of Agrokor, but there is also a huge trade exchange between these three states as well, which inevitably pushes us towards each other.
“BiH is indivisible, and everyone who is implying the disintegration of this state will not be seeing that happening and there will not be any aggressiveness in terms of security as much as some people are working in a paramilitary way. We must fight in order for all of this to function. During the next 12 months, we must not calculate with a pre-election campaign that lasts for 15 or 16 months,” concluded Chairman Covic.
(Source: klix.ba)
