Despite the tensions and opposing stances, there is optimism about the election law reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said Bakir Izetbegovic, the SDA party leader, adding that he hopes the international community will get more engaged in the process.
The inter-agency working group in charge of the reform will have a lot to do about the changes and amendments to the election law, which refer to the transparency and integrity of the process, said Izetbegovic. According to him, the group cannot work without a political agreement.
“Which is why we have the opposition involved too and, despite the tensions that we have in the country and the opposing stances, I have never been more optimistic about something that can be done,” he told media after the inauguration of the inter-agency working group on Tuesday.
Izetbegovic explained that the main obstacle in Bosnia's Bosniak-Croat shared entity, the Federation (FBiH), lies between the pro-Bosnian and pro-Bosniak political parties on one side and the Croat HDZ BiH party on the other side.
While the HDZ BiH claims that current legislation is allowing majority people, Bosniaks in this case, to elect the representatives to the Croat people, the SDA warns that minority is dictating to the majority both in the FBiH Parliament and the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said Izetbegovic, adding that this is “far from what democracy is.”
“This is suppressing and practically making meaningless the political parties without the ethnic prefix, because the civic, left-oriented parties are suffocated by such approach. So I believe that we will, based on these two demands and with the help of our friends in the international community, find a way to move this whole process forward,” Izetbegovic said.
He noted that the engagement of the international community in this process is insufficiently clear and precise.
“I hope that the international community will get more actively engaged and that it would exert a positive pressure on local actors to move closer to what we said. The main problems here are the request by the HDZ and the logic request by pro-Bosnian parties, which have nearly 60 percent of the seats in the Parliament and which are in fact compressed into a Bosniak quota of some 33 percent,” said Izetbegovic.
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