Bosnia is not ready to become an EU member and political leaders in the country do not need the EU since they have it good, while most citizens have a wrong perception of the EU, seeing it as a “major donor,” Professor at the Banja Luka Political Science Faculty, Milos Solaja, told N1 on Saturday.

Solaja said Bosnia is not doing well in the economy, that there is effectively no democracy in the country and that political parties act as “large interest groups” that do not abide by the law and set a lot of conditions for issues to be resolved.

“There is not a lot of objective evaluation regarding how well someone does their job,” he said.

“Those who are leading have it very good and they do not need to enter the EU. About 70-80 percent of people want Bosnia and Herzegovina to become an EU member, but research shows that very few of them know what that entails for the state and them personally,” he explained.

Solaja called the EU a “society of competition and a market” and said that it expects states to solve their issues, including those with unemployment, “while those are not values they have within the EU.”

Solaja said that the public has a wrong perception of the EU “which we inherited from some past times when there were a lot of promises” and now people believe that they just need to sit and wait a “the EU will come and bring the money.”

“Employment in the EU has a different goal than here – over there employment is productive, here it is bureaucratic,” he said, adding that Bosnia and Herzegovina is “not a society of investments.”

“We have little perspective, people who leave Bosnia for the EU live there as EU citizens, here they don’t want to participate in the election nor in anything else,” he said.

“The EU is seen as a major donor, but those are investments with structural adjustments so that they can be an equal member of the EU,” he said, arguing that the money does not represent welfare but “incentives for reforms that we need to raise the standards to the level we need” for the country to become a candidate.