Dodiks

Sinisa Karan wins 50.89 percent of the vote, while his main rival Branko Blanusa gets 47.81 percent, preliminary results show.

A close ally of Bosnia’s former Serb Republic leader Milorad Dodik, who was ousted from office over his separatist policies, has won the territory’s snap presidential election, according to electoral authorities.

Sinisa Karan of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats party (SNSD) won 50.89 percent of the vote in Sunday’s poll, the election commission’s president Jovan Kalaba told reporters.

Opposition candidate Branko Blanusa of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) won 47.81 percent, he said.

The results were based on 92.87 percent of counted votes, the election commission said, adding that 35.78 percent of some 1.2 million eligible voters had turned out for the election.

The presidential mandate will last for less than a year since a general election is scheduled next October.

Dodik, speaking at the SNSD headquarters in Banja Luka, the capital of Bosnian Serb statelet Republika Srpska, called Karan’s win “unquestionable”.

Karan, who currently serves as the Serb Republic minister of scientific and technological development, pledged to continue Dodik’s policies “with ever greater force”.

“As always, when the times were difficult, the Serb people have won,” he added.

The SDS, meanwhile, said it would request the repetition of the vote at three polling stations, citing major election irregularities.

The election was called to replace Dodik after he was stripped of his office and banned from politics for six years.

Dodik was ousted in August after a Bosnian court convicted him of disobeying the orders of the international High Representative for Bosnia, who oversees the implementation of the 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the bloody three-and-a-half-year Bosnian war.

He had repeatedly clashed with High Representative Christian Schmidt, declaring his decisions illegal in Republika Srpska, which is controlled by Bosnian Serbs.

The other half of the country is run jointly by Bosniaks, who are mainly Muslims, and Croats. The two entities are bound together by a central administration.

Dodik, who still advocates eventual separation of Republika Srpska from Bosnia, paid a fine to stay away from jail and stepped aside as president while staying at the helm of his governing SNSD party.

Prior to the vote, Karan said that democratic elections were “a way to strengthen our peace and stability” and to “strengthen the institutions of our Republika Srpska and our entire republic”.

But Dodik appeared to be intent on remaining in the driving seat, telling voters that “I will remain with you to fight for our political goals”, and Karan’s “victory will be my victory too”.

Bosnia’s complex political structure was established 30 years ago by the United States-brokered Dayton peace agreement, ending the 1992-95 ethnic conflict that killed more than 100,000 people and left millions homeless.

The war started when Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia and the country’s Serbs took up arms to carve up their own territory, hoping to join with neighbouring Serbia.

Vote occurs amid rising secessionist rhetoric in the Serb-majority entity and Milorad Dodik’s defiance of the Dayton peace treaty.

People are casting their votes in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serb-majority political entity, in a snap presidential election called after electoral authorities stripped separatist Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik of the presidency in August.

Dodik was removed from office for defying Bosnia’s international peace envoy, Christian Schmidt, after his conviction for ignoring rulings by the international appointee, who oversees a peace deal that has held Bosnia together since the end of its 1992-1995 war, which killed tens of thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

The court also handed him a one-year prison sentence, which he avoided by posting bail, and banned him from participating in politics for six years. Bosnia’s top court upheld that ruling in early November.

The election is seen as a crucial test of support for Dodik’s nationalist party, which has been in power for nearly two decades.

The early vote means the winner will serve less than a year before a general election in October. About 1.2 million voters are eligible to choose between six candidates.

The two main favourites to replace Dodik are Sinisa Karan, a 63-year-old former interior minister who is a close ally and Dodik’s personal choice. Dodik remains head of his party, the Union of Independent Social Democrats.

The main opposition group, the Serb Democratic Party, selected Branko Blanusa, a 56-year-old electrical engineering professor who has repeatedly levelled corruption allegations against Dodik and his party.

Preliminary results are expected on election night, but the final official vote count by the Central Election Commission will be announced only after the body also validates all outcomes.

Republika Srpska is one of two main political entities within Bosnia along with the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, each of which enjoys significant autonomy. The two share equal rights over a third, small self-governing administrative unit within the country, known as the Brcko District.

Republika Srpska was proclaimed by Bosnian Serb leaders in 1992 at the start of the war and was formally established as part of Bosnia’s post-war constitutional structure in 1995 under the Dayton peace agreement.

Today, it is overwhelmingly Serb-populated with Serbs making up 82 percent of its residents alongside smaller Bosniak and Croat minorities, according to the latest census, which was held more than a decade ago in 2013.

Its first president, Radovan Karadzic, has been sentenced to life by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague for the 1995 genocide against Bosniaks in Srebrenica, now a town inside Republika Srpska.