Electoral Mobilisation: Fear and Division as Prerequisites for Votes

On 7 September, in the first week of the election campaign, the leadership of the Republika Srpska stood before Ratko Mladić’s coffin in the Church of St. Luke in Belgrade. Paying their respects were the entity’s President, Siniša Karan; Prime Minister Savo Minić; candidate for the Presidency of BiH, Željka Cvijanović; National Assembly Speaker Nenad Stevandić; and SNSD (Alliance of Independent Social Democrats) president Milorad Dodik.

Mladić died in The Hague on 27 August, eight days before the campaign began. The Hague Tribunal had sentenced him to life imprisonment for genocide in Srebrenica, crimes against humanity and other war crimes in BiH. This act and everything surrounding it would define the election campaign in BiH. Three days before the election, Biljana Plavšić, the former president of the Republika Srpska, also died in Belgrade. She had been convicted after pleading guilty to persecution on political, racial and religious grounds, a crime against humanity. Dodik said that she had been ‘held to account before The Hague Tribunal entirely without justification’. On 4 October, voters rewarded those who had been most vocal in glorifying Mladić, despite the ban on glorifying war criminals under the Criminal Code of BiH.

For Denis Džidić, director and editor of Detektor, a media outlet dedicated to reporting on transitional justice, the main conclusion to be drawn from this campaign is that hatred – and, even more so, fear – remain the most powerful political arguments in BiH. 

Voters first accept a framework of threat and fear, then choose within it the most credible protector. Those who reject the very framework face a much harder task,’ says Džidić, who covered Mladić’s trial as a journalist.

According to preliminary results from the Central Election Commission (CEC), the SNSD increased its share of the vote for the National Assembly of the Republika Srpska from 34.6 to 39.1 per cent. Its candidates for the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the president of the Republika Srpska are leading with more than 50 per cent of the vote. In the Federation, the parties that warned of the state’s disappearance made the largest gains. Stranka za BiH (Party for BiH) more than doubled its share of the vote for the House of Representatives of the Parliament of the Federation, from 3.7 to nine per cent. The SDA (Party of Democratic Action) share rose from 24.4 to 30.6 per cent. Those who redirected fear towards external threats and the collapse of the system lost – as did the few who openly challenged it.

A Past Left Unconfronted

Reactions to Mladić’s death in the Republika Srpska were almost unanimous – among both the government and the opposition. Dodik said that ‘the Republika Srpska will not forget his role’ and that Mladić ‘took command of the army to defend Serbs, not to commit crimes against others’. Staša Košarac, Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations in the BiH Council of Ministers, wrote: ‘General Mladić was, is and will remain my commander’. The Republika Srpska’s Minister of Labour and War Veterans and Disabled Persons’ Protection, Radan Ostojić, called him ‘a hero and a valiant man whom the Serb people must remember forever’. While victims of genocide spoke of their suffering and warned of the consequences they continue to endure, Stevandić described the judgment as ‘the result of geopolitical circumstances’.

Most opposition figures differed little in their responses. Draško Stanivuković, Branko Blanuša, Jelena Trivić and Marinko Božović attended the Orthodox memorial service on Mount Ozren on 27 August, and most issued public statements bidding farewell to the deceased. Nenad Nešić, the former BiH Minister of Security of BiH, also attended the funeral in Belgrade. ‘I came to pay homage to the general,’ he told journalists.

Mladen Bubonjić, a professor in Banja Luka, says that the opposition in the Republika Srpska largely ‘thinks no differently’ on most ideological issues and knows that advocating different messages ‘in this atmosphere’ would amount to ‘political suicide’. ‘Whenever someone opens their eyes, that element of the narrative can very easily be used to brand them a traitor,’ Bubonjić said.

Yet it was not always so. Today’s obligatory conformity to the line imposed by Dodik’s SNSD is far removed from the findings of the entity government’s report on Srebrenica, presented in the summer of 2004 by the then president of the Republika Srpska, Dragan Čavić. At the time, he spoke of Srebrenica as a ‘tragedy that constitutes a dark chapter in the history of the Serb people’. ‘Anyone who committed such a crime, perhaps invoking the people to whom they belong, committed, as a named individual, a crime against their own people too,’ Čavić said. The messages of 2026 show just how far the Republika Srpska’s political leadership has since moved away from Čavić’s words.

Following Mladić’s death, the mood in BiH was sombre. While the Republika Srpska’s leadership paid tribute to him, the flood of glorification and denial of his crimes provoked outrage in the Federation. Politicians reacted fiercely, competing to capitalise on the hatred coming from the ‘other’. ‘Ratko Mladić’s death was a hugely powerful catalyst and effectively set the theme of the campaign before it formally began,’ says Denis Džidić. Biljana Plavšić’s death reopened the same debate about the past and accountability, while the investigation into the Srebrenica Memorial Centre by the entity’s police and the Bijeljina prosecutor’s office further entrenched that framework. The war, Mladić, Plavšić and Srebrenica, Džidić says, shaped political narratives far more powerfully than any discussion of what those in power would do over the next four years. Čavić himself attended Plavšić’s funeral, where he praised her contributions.

'Biljana Plavšić suffered during the years she spent in a foreign dungeon, where she ended up like almost all the leading Serbs whom history had assigned a task in the murky and difficult times of the disintegration of the Karađorđević creation and the communist state of false brotherhood and unity, Yugoslavia,’ he said.

The Enemy Without

The SNSD framed its campaign as a defence. ‘We do not like Sarajevo, we do not like Britain, we do not like Germany, we do not like Schmidt,’ Dodik said in Šamac. In Istočno Sarajevo, he called talk of coexistence ‘a historic deception perpetrated against the Serb people’. ‘There is no life for us in BiH,’ he declared. In these appearances, Russia was presented as a protector. Following a meeting with Vladimir Putin five days before the election, Minić described Russia as ‘a guarantor of the Dayton Peace Agreement’ and a country ‘that will protect the institutions of the Republika Srpska’. Cvijanović accused her opponents of using fear. ‘You are now trying to mobilise support for someone by frightening your own citizens,’ she said on RTRS (Radio-Television of the Republika Srpska).

The framework for this campaign had been established long before 4 September. On 26 February 2025, the Court of BiH sentenced Dodik at first instance to one year in prison and barred him from holding office for six years for failing to comply with the High Representative’s decisions. Months of crisis and uncertainty followed. In March, the National Assembly of the Republika Srpska adopted laws prohibiting state-level judicial and police institutions from operating in the entity. The judgment became final on 1 August 2025, Dodik lost his mandate as president of the Republika Srpska, and an early election was held in November. Fear has since been a daily theme in politics – on one side, fear for the Republika Srpska; on the other, fear for the state.

Three months before the campaign, two political leaders from opposing blocs turned this conflict into a public performance. On 23 June, Izetbegović told FBiH Television that Dodik’s status would ultimately have to be resolved through ‘some form of force’, referring, as he explained, to the judiciary. Dodik telephoned him the following day, having announced the call on X beforehand. ‘Last night, Bakir, in his fear, worked up the courage to threaten me,’ Dodik wrote. A recording of the conversation was soon released, in which Izetbegović calls Dodik a ‘pest’ and Dodik calls him a ‘useful idiot’. The exchange resembled a performance for the public more than a conversation between two politicians. Each got what he needed for the campaign – proof that the other posed a threat. For most Bosniaks, the fear was that the state would cease to exist, accompanied by the message that the war had not been forgotten. ‘While we are told not to talk about the war, the region is arming itself to the teeth,’ Bakir Izetbegović said in Brčko.

Demokratska fronta (Democratic Front) warned that ‘the gates of hell could open’ after the election. Its candidate for the Presidency, Slaven Kovačević, called the HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union) and SNSD an ‘axis of evil’. Croat parties spoke of equality. ‘We are asking for what is ours, what the Constitution entitles us to. That is not a privilege,’ said Darijana Filipović, the HDZ BiH candidate for the Presidency of BiH, at the party’s first central campaign rally in Sarajevo. In Herzegovina, too, says Kristina Perić, editor-in-chief of Istina.media, there was fear of the other and the different. ‘Fear of Željko Komšić has been carefully cultivated, particularly in Herzegovina. Over all these years, he has done both himself and Dragan Čović a great service,’ she argues.

A World in Transformation—and a Green Agenda Missing in Action

Geopolitics was a frequent theme during the campaign, but mainly as a basis for accusations. The Republika Srpska’s leadership also campaigned abroad. Five days before the election, Dodik and Minić visited Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. Aleksandar Vulin and Nikola Selaković from Serbia, along with Russian Ambassador Igor Kalabuhov, attended the SNSD’s final rally in Banja Luka.

Džidić cannot recall any candidate or party offering a serious plan to address, after the election, three immediate obstacles on the path to EU accession – the law on the Court of BiH, the law on the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council (HJPC), and the appointment of a chief negotiator. ‘These are not abstract issues. For months, the EU has identified them as key steps towards beginning the negotiating process. Yet they barely featured in the campaign,’ he says.

These issues rarely appear in party manifestos. Naša stranka (Our Party), however, makes all three conditions prerequisites for any agreement on forming a government at state level. The SDA proposes a negotiating team headed by a chief negotiator, while the HDZ’s brochure lists the laws on the HJPC and the Court of BiH as legislation before Parliament – in other words, as an achievement rather than a plan. The laws were mentioned in television debates, but mainly through mutual accusations of obstruction. ‘Even in 2026, our nationalist parties have no programme. Confrontation is their programme, and it is what keeps them going,’ says Kristina Perić. Some of the largest parties have no clearly displayed programme on their websites at all. The SNSD, for example, has its programme buried in a news item in the website’s archive, with no link from the homepage.

The green agenda was almost entirely absent or was discussed in negative terms. ‘The green transition is something we have no influence over; it is imposed on us, whether by persuasion or force,’ said Adnan Hidić of the Crvene linije (Red Lines) party. Semir Efendić, leader of Stranka za BiH, defended the country’s right to use coal until 2050. The only explicitly green manifesto came from the coalition BH Zeleni – Novo vrijeme – Tuzlanska alternativa (BH Greens – New Times – Tuzla Alternative). It received 1.2 per cent of the vote for the Parliament of the Federation and won no seats.

Rather than focusing on BiH’s place in the world and keeping pace with global changes, the campaign more often centred on weapons.

Hatred from the Past into the Present

During the official campaign, from 4 September to 2 October, the database for Detektor’s Mapping Hatred project recorded 20 cases of hate speech, glorification of war criminals and incidents. The database contains nine cases from the 2022 campaign. Beyond the numbers, the content has also changed. In the 2022 campaign, seven of the nine cases concerned the war – the glorification of Radoslav Brđanin, genocide denial and flags of Herceg-Bosna. This year, four cases concern the war, three of them involving Mladić. The remaining 16 relate to the present – to neighbours, religion and political opponents. Ten involve statements by officials from the Republika Srpska. ‘We Christians no longer wish to live under Muslim rule,’ Dodik said. Stevandić wrote about ‘Bosnian Hamas’. Faruk Kapidžić, who heads the SDA’s candidate list in Sarajevo Canton, called members of Denis Bećirović’s office ‘Gülenists and Titoists’. At an HDZ BiH rally in Derventa, a local party leader said that one of Darijana Filipović’s rival candidates was ‘very circumcised’. Graffiti reading ‘Kill the balija’ appeared in Stolac. ‘Perhaps the issue is not simply whether there are more or fewer individual examples of hatred than before, but how far the entire political conversation is framed by fear, the past and a sense of ethnic threat,’ says Džidić.

There is another fear, too, which receives less attention. Mladen Bubonjić calls it existential fear. Some voters, he says, vote out of fear ‘that you will lose what he can offer’ – a job, a position or welfare benefits. Older generations, he says, see their pensions as a gift from Dodik rather than an entitlement they have earned. ‘Fear of losing a job or being demoted is not merely present; it is one of the main levers those in power use to stay in office,’ says Kristina Perić.

Gender and Hatred

Female candidates were also attacked for being women. The municipal branch of the Croatian Republican Party (HRS) in Kiseljak wrote that ‘a married woman aged 39 who aspires to become a member of the Presidency of BiH should know how to knead dough’. The target was Darijana Filipović, the HDZ BiH candidate. On RTRS, Željka Cvijanović was asked about fears that ‘two women in the Presidency’ could, as their opponents claimed, lead to ‘the destruction of the state’. She replied that her opponents were ‘frightening their own citizens’. Both Filipović and Cvijanović come from parties that have coded fear as a central theme of their programmes.

By contrast, Sabina Ćudić, one of the few women leading a political party, ran the campaign most explicitly opposed to fear. Naša stranka was one of the election’s losers.

Two Media Landscapes

Voters in the two entities were not hearing the same campaign. According to Perić, the divisions run deeper still. There are three audiences and three groups of media outlets, each further divided into those aligned with the government, those aligned with the opposition, and others. The media also chose what audiences would hear. Klix reported Dodik’s remark about the ‘border on the Drina’ under the headline ‘Dodik’s Scandalous Statements’. The remark does not appear in RTRS’s report from the same rally.

RTRS had its own election programming, but without debates between the government and the opposition. The SDS (Serb Democratic Party) candidate for president of the Republika Srpska, Branko Blanuša, declined an invitation to a head-to-head debate, explaining that he had ‘no intention of taking part in the regime’s charade’. Minić appeared alone on the programme, speaking beside an empty chair.

Those Who Took a Stand

Naša stranka ran the campaign most clearly opposed to fear and division. Its slogan was ‘Let’s Live Freely’. It was one of the few campaigns to focus on the individual rather than on membership of a group or a people. It focused on the individual rather than the collective. The campaign website opened with questions: ‘Are you one of us or one of them? Where is your family from? Who are you dating? Where are your children?’

‘For decades, they have divided us at borders, in school playgrounds, at work and in stadiums. For too long, they have told us what to fear,’ wrote party leader Sabina Ćudić. 

‘We did not frighten, threaten or blackmail anyone,’ she said at the final rally in Sarajevo. Naša stranka’s share of the vote for the Parliament of the Federation fell from 5.2 to 3.8 per cent, and its number of seats from six to four. Much of that decline occurred in Sarajevo Canton, where the party was part of the government and faced widespread criticism. Its share of the vote for the Sarajevo Canton Assembly fell from 11.8 to 6.9 per cent, and it lost more than half its votes. In Tuzla Canton, where it was not in government, its share rose from 3.5 to 4.8 per cent.

Narod i pravda (People and Justice), its partner in the cantonal government, also lost ground in Sarajevo, falling from 18.2 to 13.9 per cent. The third coalition partner, the SDP (Social Democratic Party), increased its share in the same canton from 15.7 to 21.8 per cent. Voters did not, therefore, punish the government as a whole. They punished two of its constituent parties. Džidić sees Naša stranka as one of the few exceptions consciously trying to build a political platform beyond the logic of fear of the other. ‘Their result shows just how difficult it is today to translate a message that begins with “we oppose division” into political gains when competitors offer voters a much simpler message: “they threaten you, and we will protect you”,’ he says.

Under the slogan ‘One State. One Team.’, the SDP spoke out against division. ‘One state does not mean one identity,’ their manifesto states. The SDP was the only party in the Federation with such a message to make modest gains – its share of the vote for the Parliament of the Federation rose from 13.5 to 15.4 per cent. On RTRS, in the only debate held by the Republika Srpska’s public broadcaster, the SDP’s candidate for vice-president of the entity, Ivan Begić, said that ‘it is much easier to profit from nationalist rhetoric and control the electorate than to carry out projects’.

In the Republika Srpska, messages opposing division largely concerned divisions within the Serb people. ‘Paranoia and the label of traitor, imposed on everyone who thinks differently from those in power, are also levers of power,’ says Kristina Perić. Opposition leaders, she says, must be the first to free themselves from this. In Bijeljina, Stanivuković called for a the Republika Srpska ‘that will not be divided into traitors and patriots’, while at the same time describing Mladić as ‘deeply inscribed in our history’.

Only one electoral list in the Republika Srpska stated in its manifesto that it ‘rejects rhetoric that generates fear and division for the purposes of political mobilisation’ – Nebojša Vukanović’s ‘Za pravdu i red’ (For Justice and Order). On the day of Mladić’s death, however, Vukanović published a lengthy post on his blog about the ‘general’, who was ‘held in high regard by his soldiers’ and ‘was not afraid’. He made no mention of the genocide conviction. When asked about this during a debate on BHT1 (Bosnia and Herzegovina Television), he accused media outlets from the Federation of ‘putting targets on people’s foreheads’ and ‘constantly seeking to stigmatise Serbs’. His list was projected to retain four seats – the same number as in 2022.

Who Gained

Fear was not the only factor. Denis Džidić describes it as the first filter through which voters view elections. Only once they have aligned themselves according to whom or what they supposedly need protection from is it decided who will win more votes within each bloc. Voters used this filter to sift through the political options on offer. Among those that passed through it, they chose according to other criteria – who held power and controlled resources, who was credible, and who had done what in office and how well. Fear therefore did not benefit everyone who used it.

This is clearest in the Federation. Demokratska fronta, whose candidate described the election as a struggle of ‘anti-fascism against fascism’ and warned of the ‘gates of hell’, lost almost half its share of the vote for the Parliament of the Federation. Komšić’s list in his constituency lost around 80 per cent of the votes he had personally received four years earlier. From several hundred thousand votes, Komšić fell to fewer than 20,000.

Crvene linije, formed ahead of the election by Kemal Ademović, a former Narod i pravda delegate in the House of Peoples of BiH, proclaimed on its posters that its members were ‘back on the front lines’. Ademović headed the list for the Sarajevo Canton Assembly. The list received 1.65 per cent of the vote, far below the electoral threshold.

Defence Minister Zukan Helez delivered messages similar to Komšić’s. Speaking from Banja Luka, he told advocates of secession: ‘If anyone tries, they will face a brutal response’. But Helez headed the SDP’s list, and in his constituency for the Parliament of BiH, the SDP’s share of the vote rose from 12.9 to 17.3 per cent, retaining its seat. The same message produced a different result. The party behind it proved decisive.

Haris Zahiragić, an outspoken and increasingly influential SDA member, travelled to Zagreb as early as June to appear on a live programme, declaring that ‘Herceg-Bosna will never be established, either in the Federation or in BiH’. ‘When you make threats, you need to know what you’re threatening to do. I am warning you: BiH and its society were traumatised enough in the 1990s for such developments, especially when they come [from] a neighbouring state, to be unwelcome here. I felt the need to tell you that in person,’ Zahiragić said. In the election, he received as many votes as Konaković, Ćudić and Komšić combined.

This time, voters punished fragmentation. There will be no small parties holding a single seat in the Sarajevo Canton Assembly. Parties built around individual leaders following splits from larger parties mostly failed to cross the threshold. Jelena Trivić, who left the PDP (Party of Democratic Progress) and formed Narodni front (People’s Front), met the same fate. In the Republika Srpska, the SDS – whose candidate warned that the Republika Srpska could become an ‘empty shell’ and bid Mladić farewell with ‘May your memory be eternal, General’ – fell to its weakest result since 2002, receiving 12.1 per cent of the vote for the National Assembly. Nenad Stevandić’s Ujedinjena Srpska (United Srpska) retained its share of around five per cent and is projected to gain an additional seat. Nešić, who left his post as Minister of Security after his arrest in December 2024 and remains under investigation, is projected to enter the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH. He heads the DNS-NPS (Democratic People’s Alliance – People’s Party of Srpska) compensation list, which secured one compensatory seat.

HDZ BiH has almost the same share of the vote as in 2022, and Filipović leads the race for the Croat member of the Presidency. Perić also sees something positive in this – the departure of Komšić and his candidate ‘by the will of the Bosniak people’. ‘Dragan Čović is now exposed too. Komšić can no longer serve as his party’s programme, and he will have to offer the people something concrete,’ she says.

Fewer Voters, the Same Core

Some 1.43 million people voted at regular polling stations, around 42 per cent of registered voters. This is the lowest turnout in a general election since the war. Fear did not mobilise new voters. According to the votes counted so far, both the SNSD and the SDA have received fewer votes than in 2022. Their shares are rising because the total number of voters has fallen more sharply than their own support.

Yet the missing voters have not disappeared by chance. According to a 2021 UNFPA survey, around 269,000 young people aged 18 to 29 are considering leaving the country. Their foremost reasons are the search for stability and prospects, employment and a life in a less corrupt society. They also cite a desire to live ‘in a more politically stable society without interethnic tensions’. Those who remain vote, Bubonjić says, ‘out of inertia, on orders and out of that existential fear’. He describes them as ‘party soldiers’ who would ‘go to the moon to vote if necessary’.

A Night Without Major Attacks

Election night passed more calmly than in previous years. New technologies at polling stations sped up the processing of results. The CEC published its first preliminary results shortly after 8 pm, with 80 per cent of polling stations processed – and it was already clear who was winning.

The Pod lupom coalition, which observed the election, assessed it as the freest and fairest to date, because ‘systemic electoral fraud’ had been prevented. His strong result probably dissuaded Dodik from once again accusing the CEC of being under the influence of politicians in Sarajevo.

But this voting trend will confront party leaders at the next election with the question of whether challenging messages of fear and hatred pays off at all. ‘Perhaps it is more accurate to say that fear is the infrastructure of hatred. Hatred is what we see and map. Fear is what enables it to function politically,’ says Džidić.