The newly elected mayor of Sarajevo’s central municipality, Srdjan Mandic, said although the pandemic prevented him from celebrating his overwhelming success at Sunday’s local elections, he nevertheless spent a sleepless night with mixed emotions.

Mandic is a member of Nasa Stranka, one of the four parties in the left-leaning coalition that won in four out of the five municipalities in the city. He analyzed the defeat of the ruling Party of Democratic Action (SDA) and said most citizens felt the SDA had let them down.

“Their defeat is a consequence of the system they come from which has for a long time only served its own purpose. We have spent part of our campaign talking to people, 90 percent of those conversations began with ‘they have cheated on us’,” he said.

The left-leaning coalition had also won the 2018 election in Sarajevo but their government was ousted by the SDA, and Mandic said that at the time this may have been a politically legitimate process but that “there was no need for it.”

“They (the SDA) look at everything through a prism of the budget,” he said, arguing that voters punished the party and showed that they want others to take over.

The coalition represents new hope for many people, Mandic said, arguing that he came across a lot of them who said that they “finally had someone to vote for.”

“I was worried because I knew there were a lot of people who started packing their suitcases even though they didn’t have existential problems. They just couldn’t take it anymore,” Mandic said, referring to the massive emigration from Bosnia. “I'm glad they stayed here. I think some SDA voters stayed home, and some of ours woke up because I see that toward the end there was an increase in turnout.”

Mandic stressed that it is finally time for Bosnia and Herzegovina to introduce electronic voting.

“That is something normal elsewhere in the world and it’s a fact that authorities refused to introduce it here for years,” he said, adding that such a system is not even that expensive to acquire.

“In my view, the Sarajevo that we love and we long for won yesterday. Maybe we will disagree over some ideological issues, but let us continue building until then,” he said.