Deadlock Remains Over Elections in Bosnia's Mostar

The latest attempt to find a solution for the deadlock over elections in the Bosnian city of Mostar collapsed on Thursday after the latest meeting of the political parties failed to reach an agreement.

The city will likely have to wait another two years for local elections.

"This is no surprise since we have situation in which the main parties are trying to find a solution for six years - but seem to prefer this situation to go on," Amna Popovac, a politician from the left-oriented Nasa Stranka party, told BIRN.

Popovac recalled that several previous meetings had ended without results; one idea had been to hold the local elections alongside the general elections due in October this year.

The two main parties in the southwestern city, the [Bosniak] Party of Democratic Action, SDA, and the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, "keep on trying to find solutions but nothing changes ever, which is causing more problems and insecurities," Popovac said.

According to Popovac, one problem is that while the annual budget of the city is around 30 million euros, no one is now sure how the money is spent.

"That is one reason why we need elections, to see what they are doing with our public money. I am sure that if Mostar was deprived of its budget, a compromise over elections would be reached overnight," Popovac said.

Mostar is now the only municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina in which no local elections have been held since 2012.

In June that year, Bosnia's Constitutional Court ruled that the city's electoral statute was unconstitutional because the six electoral constituencies, traced following the ethnic separation line between Croats and Bosniaks, each elected the same number of representatives to the city council despite having...