So this is democracy

Bosnia's election

A small country prepares to elect a bewildering number of politicians
Sep 30th 2010

FRUSTRATED Bosnians sometimes remark that what their country, population 3.8m, needs is a mayor, not a complex series of overlapping governments. On October 3rd, however, they will vote for everything except mayors: the parliament of their weak central state, parliaments for the two parts of their country, cantonal parliaments and several presidents. Nobody expects this flurry of voting to change anything in this troubled country.

In November Bosnians will mark the 15th anniversary of the end of the war that devastated their homeland. In 1995, corralled into an airbase in Dayton, Ohio, their leaders agreed to a complex set of formulae that ended the conflict but left Bosnia with an awkward political legacy, formally splitting it into the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS) and a federation of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats.

Immediately after the war Bosnia drifted. Then came a period of dynamism and reform. But the past four years have seen a fall back into stagnation. In 2009 GDP contracted by 2.9%. This year growth is forecast to be an anaemic 0.8%.

Yet economic reform is not a priority for some of the country’s politicians. Milorad Dodik, prime minister of the RS, now running for its presidency, has been denying that Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, when they killed 8,000 Bosniaks after the town’s fall. An electoral video doing the rounds sums up Mr Dodik’s style. It shows a giant truck, festooned with party banners, crushing two small cars representing the opposition.

In the Bosniak-Croat federation, several parties are competing for the Bosniak vote. One big question is whether a new actor on the political scene, Fahrudin Radoncic, a controversial businessman and owner of one of the main dailies, makes a breakthrough. Croats, strongly outnumbered by Bosniaks in the federation, have the choice of two Croatian parties or one, the SDP, that also appeals to Bosniaks and Serbs.

Months of bargaining will follow the elections. Competing parties and politicians will jostle for cabinet seats in Bosnia’s various administrations, and for control over the big state-owned companies that finance their parties. All this makes the prospect of enacting the reforms the country badly needs extremely doubtful. The Bosniak-Croat federation faces particular problems: virtually bankrupt, it is saddled with large pension obligations for war veterans. An attempt to rein in the payments triggered violent protests in April.

As so often in Bosnia, the main prod to reform may come from outside. In the wake of a failed attempt a year ago to get some agreement between Bosnia’s competing ethnic groups, Europeans and Americans seemed briefly to have given up on the country. But that may change when the new governments are in place.

As elsewhere in the Balkans, the biggest prize for Bosnia would be EU membership. The presence of an international representative with the power to remove elected politicians technically makes the country ineligible to apply for candidacy, although Bosnians hope that the EU will bend the rules. In the meantime, Bosnia (and Albania) may win visa-free travel to the EU’s Schengen zone, thanks largely to hard work in law enforcement. If, however, France tries to torpedo this, as recent reports suggest it might, the EU’s credibility in the Balkans will be further damaged—and Bosnians will learn that politics can trump rules. That would be a terrible message to send.

Europe

the economist

http://www.economist.com/node/17155776