An ally of Bosnian Serb separatist leader Milorad Dodik was on course to win the presidency of the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia, according to near-complete preliminary results on Monday, while the opposition claimed the election was marred by massive fraud.
With about 99% of ballots counted, Sinisa Karan, Dodik's candidate, held roughly 50% of the vote, against around 48% for his main rival, Branko Blanusa. Blanusa and other opposition figures alleged irregularities in three towns near the border with Serbia, including the illegal importation of voters from Serbia, whom they suspect cast ballots for the pro-Dodik candidate.
"These elections are not over yet, they will be over when the election process is repeated in the three towns where, thanks to election manipulations, the results do not reflect the will of the people," Blanusa said, vowing not to concede.
The snap vote was triggered after Dodik was removed from the presidency in August. A Bosnian court convicted him of defying the orders of the international High Representative for Bosnia, sentencing him to a year in prison and a six-year ban on public office. He paid a fine to avoid jail and stepped aside as president, while retaining leadership of his governing party. Dodik declared victory for Karan and denounced the process that led to his ouster, saying: "They wanted to bring down Dodik in an unfair process and now they got two Dodiks."
Bosnia's complex political system, established by a US-brokered peace deal 30 years ago ending the 1992-95 war that killed more than 100,000 people, divides the country into a Serb-run entity and a joint Bosniak-Croat entity, bound by central institutions. Dodik still advocates full separation of the Serb entity, a policy that has drawn US and British sanctions. The United States lifted its sanctions last month after he agreed to step down, but he continues to clash with international envoy Christian Schmidt over the legality of his decisions in Republika Srpska.
