Pressure Mounts on Bosnia to Change Electoral Law

On a visit to Ankara, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic has asked President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to support a Bosnian Croat call to change Bosnia's electoral law to give them more political power.

Meanwhile, members of the EU Commission, the US embassy to Bosnia and the OSCE will meet political parties on Wednesday in Sarajevo also to convince them to work on a new election law.

Media reports said the focus of this meeting would also be on changing the electoral law in Mostar, a city in southwest Bosnia that has not held any local elections since 2008 owing to years of disputes about the election code.

Following a ruling of Bosnia's Constitutional Court, which declared Mostar's electoral statute unconstitutional, the city has repeatedly missed holding local elections.

Mostar's two main Bosniak and Croat parties, the Croatian Democratic Union of BiH, HDZBiH, and the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, have been unable to find a compromise to reform the law.

Politicians said the chances of a breakthough now looked remote.

"I believe the chances of agreement on this issue are small, as there are different views on the content of the proposition, so I do not believe compromise can be achieved," Mladen Ivanic, the Serbian member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, told the media.

Borjana Kristo, chair of the House of Representatives of Bosnia's parliament, agreed. "We had regular meetings until Christmas but no agreement was reached - so we have decided not to talk about this meeting before we get a solution," Kristo said.

Bosnia is due to hold a general election in 2018 amid fears that, without a new law, it may be impossible to form of the House of Peoples [the upper chamber], either at state level or in the...

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