Milorad Dodik claims victory in Bosnia election and declares country dead

What happened in the Bosnia election?Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb nationalist leader, has declared a sweeping election victory for his party in Bosnia and Herzegovina, using the moment to proclaim the fractured country "dead" and praise Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.Although Dodik was banned from holding public office last year after defying the international peace envoy, his proxy candidates dominated the polls. His close ally, Željka Cvijanović of the right-wing Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, secured more than 55 per cent of the vote to claim the Serb seat in the country's tripartite presidency. With nearly 90 per cent of ballots counted, she held a commanding 30-point lead over her closest rival.## Why is Milorad Dodik claiming victory?Dodik also claimed his nationalist party would hold a "vast majority" in Republika Srpska’s regional assembly. At a press conference late on Sunday, he credited Donald Trump’s 2024 US election victory and Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for the momentum. "No one should ask us to change our politics," Dodik said. "We will not give up... I cannot believe that we smashed it like this."In the other presidential races, Darijana Filipović of the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union took a comfortable lead for the Croat seat. The race for the Bosniak seat was much tighter, with the incumbent Denis Bećirović of the Social Democratic Party leading his rival, Bakir Izetbegović, by less than three percentage points. Both Filipović and Bećirović declared victory before the final count.Turnout was low, reflecting widespread disillusionment in one of Europe’s poorest nations. Only 42 per cent of the 3.4 million eligible voters cast a ballot, a drop of about eight percentage points from the last election in 2022.## Is Bosnia on the verge of breaking up?Bosnia's governing system is a highly complex web of ethnic quotas created by the US-brokered Dayton Accords, which ended the brutal 1992-1995 war. The country is split into the Bosniak-and-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska.Dodik has spent years testing the limits of this arrangement, openly defying the central government in Sarajevo and pushing for his Serb entity to secede. At a final campaign rally in Banja Luka, attended by Russian Ambassador Igor Khalabukov, Dodik told supporters that Bosnia "is dead" and called it "an impossible country" that "doesn’t make any sense."The result leaves Bosnia’s hopes of joining the European Union in deep freeze, with voters continuing to split along ethnic lines. Dragan Bursać, a political analyst, said the international ban on Dodik had failed. "It is obvious that these measures to ban him from political life are not working," Bursać said. "He is still in command. He is everywhere."