The election campaign also brings with it calculations by the parties of how many votes they need to become parliamentary at different levels. The low electoral threshold and the existence of constituencies give hope to many parties that they can become parliamentary.
A good starting point for parties to estimate the number of mandates they can hope for is the past General Elections. Of course, demographic trends but also the distribution of votes among political entities should be taken into account.
The House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has 42 representatives, of which 28 are elected from the Federation of BiH (FBiH), and 14 from the Republika Srpska (RS).
In the General Elections of 2014, 29,726 votes were needed to cross the electoral threshold of three percent and enter the BiH Parliament. The then A-SDA had so much that it ensured it was a parliamentary party at the state level. That every vote is important is shown by the example of the coalition gathered around the HDZ in 1990, which had 28,962 votes or 2.93 percent, so because of a few hundred votes, it was left without a state representative. A party can get a representative in the state Parliament if it wins less than three percent of the total votes if it won a direct mandate in a constituency.
Of the 28 representatives from the FBiH, 21 are elected according to constituencies, and seven on the basis of compensatory mandates. SDA, SDP and SBB each received two compensatory mandates in the 2018 General Election, and one went to Our Party (Nasa Stranka).
FBiH
The House of Representatives of the Parliament of the FBiH is the largest in the country and has 98 representatives. Of that number, 25 are compensatory mandates that do not have a geographical location, and 73 mandates are distributed in constituencies.
It is important to point out that in order to have representatives, the party does not have to cross the electoral threshold of three percent at the level of the entire FBiH, but it is enough to win a direct mandate in one of the constituencies. Thus People and Justice (Narod i Pravda), the coalition around HDZ 1990 and A-SDA had less than three percent of the vote, but won two direct mandates each thanks to good results in certain constituencies. The Party for BiH had only 215 votes less than People and Justice, but it failed to win any direct mandate and remained a non-parliamentary party.
Regarding this level of government, the example of Our Party is interesting. Our Party won a total of six mandates, five of which were compensatory. The SDA had the same number of compensatory mandates as Our Party, which won the largest number of representatives in total.
There is a similar example of the Independent Bloc, which of the four mandates it won had three compensatory mandates. On the opposite side of the spectrum there is the Democratic Front, which won a total of 10 mandates, of which nine were direct, and only one mandate was compensatory.
Overall, for the parties in BiH, it is not only important how many votes they win, but also how these votes are distributed territorially, Klix.ba reports.
E.Dz.
