How did the reform of the electoral process force the political traders to withdraw? Fewest candidates and shortest ballots in the recent history of elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Technical changes to the Electoral Law imposed by former High Representative Christian Schmidt in 2024 triggered a wave of political parties shutting down and withdrawing. The stricter rules and the new system of appointing election committees dealt a financial and logistical blow to political entities that existed only on paper. Thus, the reform cut the long-standing chain of political corruption, the trading of seats in electoral committees, due to which numerous miniature parties lost their sole purpose of existence overnight. Profit. Is the political scene in Bosnia and Herzegovina being purged of so-called ‘phantom parties’?
Former High Representative Christian Schmidt did what domestic politicians could not or did not want for decades: to bring order to the electoral process. He imposed a package to improve the integrity of the electoral process. And his decisions are already visible. The number of certified political subjects to participate in the elections this year is significantly lower compared to previous election cycles: from 145, the number dropped to 108 political subjects. The goal of the changes was to prevent the trading of seats in electoral committees and the registration of fictitious parties. Election committee presidents and their deputies can no longer be members of political parties.
“The goal was to completely control the electoral committee so that votes and election results could be manipulated. This is precisely why, when such phenomena are prevented, we see a decline in certified political subjects to participate in elections, which is actually very positive and will actually absolutely eliminate these types of electoral irregularities that we had before,” said the spokesman of the Coalition under scrutiny, Hasan Kamenjaković.
And the number of certified parties fell from 90 to 75. Due to changes in the law, phantom parties also lost their purpose. Most of them either shut down after the changes in the law or no longer participate in the electoral process. Just like the so-called independent candidates. This year there are only four of them.
“This is best illustrated by the example of the elections in Doboj in 2020, when 86 parties applied for the elections, and 76 had less than 5 votes. So that showed enough why those parties were in the election process,” said Srđan Traljić, TIBiH public relations manager.
Their previous application was actually never aimed at participating in the election race, but rather the trading of polling stations, Transparency International explains. Small parties would apply, get seats in electoral committees and give them to the ruling parties. Now, only parliamentary breaks have the right to those seats, which contributed to the reduction of fictitious parties, but did not completely prevent all abuses.
“Where could you report a member of the electoral committee that he was in front of one political party and now in front of another. The Central Election Commission imposed certain sanctions, but it went down in court, you cannot forbid anyone to change political parties,” Traljić added.
However, even when the sentence was pronounced, it did not mean much for the big political parties. Not even the changes from 2022, which, in addition to defining the abuse of public resources for campaign purposes, were an introduction to digitization, i.e. the introduction of scanners and biometric verification of voters. By doing so, they took away the tools of party members of election committees to manipulate ballots, Federalna writes.
