Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serb-majority government, Republika Srpska, casts a snap presidential election on Sunday following the removal of separatist leader Milorad Dodik from office in August.
Dodik was removed after he was convicted for refusing to carry out decisions issued by Christian Schmidt, the international peace envoy who oversees implementation of the Dayton peace agreement that ended the 1992–95 Bosnian War.
Additionally, the court forbade him from running for president for six years and gave him a one-year prison sentence that he avoided by posting bail. The Supreme Court of Bosnia upheld that decision in early November.
In October, the National Assembly of Republika Srpska appointed Ana Trisic-Babic as an interim president until the Sunday election.
What is known about the vote and why it matters, as well.
When will there be a snap election in Republika Srpska?
According to Bosnia’s Central Election Commission (CIK), voting will be open on Sunday, November 23, between 7am (06: 00 GMT) and 7pm (18: 00 GMT). More than 1.2 million people, who come from Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs, are eligible to cast ballots. In previous presidential elections, turnout typically ranged between 50 and 55 percent.
Although Trisic-Babic was appointed as an interim president, the law still requires new elections within 90 days of a president’s removal.
The election resulted in a less than a year of service for Dodik’s successor until the general elections in October.
When will the results be made public?
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: What is it?
Along with the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, each of Bosnia’s two main political parties enjoys significant autonomy, is Republika Srpska. The two share equal rights over a small, third self-governing administrative unit within the country, known as the Brcko District.
Bosnian Serb leaders formally established the post-war constitutional structure of Bosnia in 1992 with the signing of the Dayton peace agreement. In 1992, Republika Srpska was established.
The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina forms the majority of Bosnia’s territory, while the Republic of Srpska accounts for about 49% of that territory.
Republika Srpska has its own government, parliament, judiciary and police, but not its own army.
According to the most recent census, which was conducted more than a decade ago in 2013, Serbia accounts for roughly 82 percent of its residents, along with smaller Bosniak and Croat minorities.
Due to the ethnic cleansing of non-Serb communities, it’s demographics dramatically changed during and after the war. Before the conflict, Bosniaks and Croats made up about half of the population in the area that is now Republika Srpska, today, they account for less than 17 percent.
Radovan Karadzic, the country’s first president, was given a life sentence in The Hague for the 1995 genocide against Bosniaks in Srebrenica, a town within Republika Srpska.
What makes elections significant?
The elections come at a highly sensitive time for Bosnia. Republika Srpska has increased its rhetoric to secede from Bosnia in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with Dodik, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, increasingly urging the country to secede, possibly joining Serbia.
After his removal from office and his longstanding rule over Republika Srpska’s politics, Dodik will be replaced by these elections. The vote is also a test of how much influence he can still exert, despite being banned from political activity.
The candidates are who?
Six candidates are running for president, four of whom are political parties, and two of whom are independents.
The main contenders are Sinisa Karan of Dodik’s ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), who is directly backed by Dodik, and Branko Blanusa of the opposition Serb Democratic Party (SDS).
Former Republika Srpska interior minister and long-time member of Dodik’s inner circle. In the current Republika Srpska government, he is minister for higher education and scientific and technological development.
According to Radio Free Europe, he was part of a group ‘ tasked ‘ to draft an SNSD plan for Republika Srpska to break away from Bosnia.
Dodik views Karan as an extension of his own authority, according to analysts. Dodik has frequently attended Karan’s rallies.
Blanusa, the SDS candidate, is a member of the party’s Banja Luka City Committee and a professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Banja Luka.
Karadzic was the original leader of the SDS, which is now Republika Srpska’s main opposition party. It has long competed for the same electorate as Dodik’s SNSD and is a Serb nationalist party.
While it is critical of Dodik’s style of governance and allegations of corruption, it broadly shares similar positions on key political issues, including relations with the capital Sarajevo and scepticism towards the international overseer of the peace agreement.
Dragan Dokanovic of the Alliance for New Politics (SNP) and Nikola Lazarevic of the Ecological Party of Republika Srpska are the other party-backed candidates.
On the ballot are two independent candidates, Igor Gasevic and Slavko Dragicevic, who have largely remained unaudited.
Who is Milorad Dodik?
Former Republika Srpska president Milorad Dodik, 66, is a.
He was supported by Western governments in the late 1990s when he became the organization’s prime minister in 1998. He was viewed as a promising alternative to Karadzic’s hardline nationalist government and the post-war regime’s ruling SDS. Then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described Dodik as “a breath of fresh air”, and both the United States and the United Kingdom placed their hopes in him as a more moderate future option.
He was one of the first Republika Srpska leaders to acknowledge the genocide at Srebrenica. Dodik, the head of SNSD since its formation, claimed in a 2007 interview that “there was a genocide in Srebrenica” that he “perfectly knew what took place.
“That judgement was made by the court in The Hague, and that is an undeniable legal fact”, he said.
He has won again in 2022 after serving three terms as Republika Srpska’s president, winning twice in two separate mandates from 2010 to 2018. He was elected to Bosnia’s three-member presidency in 2018 as the Serb candidate.
During this period, however, Dodik adopted a far more nationalist stance, repeatedly calling for the entity’s secession, and denying the Srebrenica genocide – going back on his own earlier admissions.
Dodik signed two contentious bills in 2023 that stated that Republika Srpska would not be able to apply the rulings of the Bosnian constitutional court and the Dayton Agreement peace envoy. Those bills were blocked by the constitutional court and the peace envoy.
In March 2025, the constitutional court issued arrest warrants for Milorad Dodik and several of his allies on charges of undermining the constitutional order. However, a month later, Republika Srpska police prevented State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) agents from entering the Republika Srpska government’s administrative center to arrest Dodik, escalating the conflict even further.
Dodik was removed from office and barred from politics in Bosnia in August. He, however, remains the president of the SNSD party and continues to be its most powerful figure.
Does Bosnia as a whole suffer as a result of the Republika Srpska political crisis?
Yes. The two countries have a strong relationship, and Bosnia is a nation that relies on a power-sharing system. The national level of stability may be impacted by the opposition to state institutions and the rise of secessionist threats.
The early election also strains Bosnia’s economy. In a nation with one of Europe’s smallest economies, the vote is funded by the state budget rather than the organization’s own institutions. The Bosnian Central Election Commission has allocated close to $4 million to the election, or more than six million Bosnian marks.
The UK government, one of the guarantors of , the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, said at a United Nations Security Council meeting on Bosnia in October that holding presidential elections in the Republika Srpska would give “an opportunity for formation of their new government”, insisting that “the constitutional order and rule of law in Bosnia and Herzegovina must be upheld”.
At the meeting, UK representative Jennifer MacNaughtan said, “We support a focus on constructive and cooperative politics, even between Bosnia and Herzegovina’s two entities.”
Russia, a staunch supporter of Republika Srpska, praised the interim president’s transition to Dodik in October, while also reaffirming Dodik’s position that the Office of the High Representative peace envoy (OHR) should be “permanently closed.”
In conversation with the media, the spokesperson of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, said the Russian Federation “wholeheartedly supports” the struggle of the leadership of Republika Srpska against “eroding fundamental principles” of the Dayton peace treaty.
The US has not made an official comment on the elections, but the Department of Treasury has recently lifted sanctions against Dodik, his family, and his allies, including SNDS candidate Karan, for tampering with the Dayton peace agreement. Serb officials in Bosnia have suggested that they were pursuing a more cooperative relationship with the US while still maintaining their close ties with Russia.
Republika Srpska’s strongest ally, Serbia, has taken a more cautious stance than usual. Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vucic, who has been a subject of anti-government protests for almost a year, avoided directly commenting on the elections in an interview with the state-owned Radio Television of Serbia. He stated that he hoped for the Republic of Srpska’s “peaceful” outcome and that everything would “pass peacefully.” He added that Serbia would always be there to help with “infrastructure”.
What might occur following the election?
Dodik’s influence on the SNSD’s Karan would likely continue if he were to win. Speaking to Euronews Serbia, Karan said the vote had been “forced” onto Republika Srpska by the peace envoy Schmidt and that a vote for him is “a vote for President Dodik”.
The Republika Srpska National Assembly also has a sizable majority, thanks to the ruling SNSD.
Under the current leadership, Republika Srpska has become “impoverished, displaced, and isolated,” according to Blanusa of the opposition’s SDS party, and has pledged to make combating corruption in the organization its top priority.
Indeed, the entity faces deep economic challenges. Total gross domestic product (GDP) for the year 2023 was approximately 16 billion Bosnian marks (roughly $9 billion), making up a third of the country’s GDP, according to the Republika Srpska’s Database of Economic Indicators.
