The Central Election Commission (CEC) is scheduled to call general elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in early May, as they are scheduled for October. This leaves very little time and space to agree on changes to the Election Law.
According to the current law, elections must be called six months before they are held, in order to give enough time for the registration of lists and candidates, their certification, preparation of materials, etc. One of the problems related to the elections is their financing since BiH does not yet have a state budget for this year.
However, the financing of the elections should probably not be a stumbling block, given that the money in the amount of about eight million BAM can be provided from other sources.
The Election Law is something that represents a burden on the political spectrum in BiH. All previous attempts have been unsuccessful. However, Croatia’s lobbying in Brussels, especially after the adoption of the Strategic Compass of the European Union (EU), which also mentioned the constituent peoples in the document, further encouraged Croatia. On these wings, the story of another round of negotiations for changes to the Election Law was updated, but this time in Brussels.
It is clear that the leader of the HDZ, Dragan Covic, is interested in something like that, but the question is whether there will be a riot among the representatives of the parties from Sarajevo to try to make an agreement in Brussels once again.
On that occasion, Alma Colo (SDA) was contacted, a state representative and one of the actors in the previous negotiations on the Election Law in Sarajevo, but also in Neum. Colo claims that so far she has not received an invitation to continue negotiations in Brussels.
“I don’t know anything about the negotiations in Brussels. We have a session of the Interdepartmental Working Group in the BiH Parliament tomorrow and we will try to harmonize technical changes to the law, so if there is a political will to at least adopt that,” deputy Colo told yesterday.
But, when asked if she supports the continuation of negotiations in Brussels, Colo said she does not support such an option and that there is no time for changes to the BiH Constitution with the aim of implementing the Strasbourg judgments.
To recall, the idea of postponing the elections for a month or two was placed earlier, if there was a chance for an agreement and for the political agreement to be implemented and confirmed in the BiH Parliament.
There is little or no time for negotiations, and whether it makes sense to negotiate more will probably be decided by the EU.
