Author: Darko Brkan
The results of the general elections in BiH, that were implemented on October 4, 2026, never before were announced so quickly and never before has the public in BiH been more clear about the results than this time. But, two weeks after the elections – one candidate that was an apparent winner of elections seems to be losing. Ivan Begić, candidate of SDP for RS vice-president is losing the race to Igor Balukčić, candidate of HDZ 1990. This is the result of diaspora votes being counted and creating a crucial different for the HDZ 1990 candidate. So, once more, BiH citizens living outside of BiH will be decisive in electing an official in BiH – this time the vice-president of Republika Srpska.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has never had the luxury of elections being entirely its own affair, even thou it does not lack issues of its own. Three decades after the Dayton Peace Agreement, its electoral system remains burdened by ethnic divisions, discriminatory constitutional arrangements, political patronage, weak institutions and persistent allegations of fraud. Yet some of the most consequential threats to electoral integrity originate outside the country’s borders.
Serbia and Croatia, Bosnia’s two most influential neighbors, routinely treat its domestic politics as an extension of their own. Political endorsements, financial support, diplomatic pressure, voter organization and transporting and cross-border media campaigns have become familiar features of Bosnian election cycles.
Neither country is a conventional “foreign power” in the Bosnian context. Both are signatories to the Dayton Peace Agreement, both have citizens with deep family and historical connections to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and both have legitimate interests in the country’s stability and European integration. Yet both governments have also developed unusually strong relationships with particular political forces inside BiH. Freedom House has explicitly described, alongside Russia and Turkey, Serbia and Croatia as exercising political leverage through their respective local allies, the SNSD and HDZ BiH.
The relationship is not one-directional. Bosnia’s citizens, particularly those holding Serbian or Croatian citizenship, can and do also influence elections in neighboring countries. What emerges is a political space in which elections are formally national but increasingly transnational in practice.
And the October 2026 elections in Bosnia, followed by Serbia’s parliamentary elections coming on October 25, provide an opportunity to examine just how consequential this problem has become.
Serbia and Bosnia – when the border becomes a campaign bus
Serbia’s involvement in Republika Srpska’s politics is neither new nor particularly discreet. Meeting of officials, both official and private, public endorsements, media campaigns, joined media statements, all the way to voter transportation have all been a part of the arsenal of Serbia’s role in BiH elections.
Aleksandar Vučić’s relationship with Milorad Dodik has long extended beyond ordinary interstate cooperation. Their meetings, public appearances and joint political messages reinforce Dodik’s position as a leader enjoying the backing of Belgrade.
Vučić has repeatedly met Milorad Dodik and other senior Republika Srpska officials and has publicly defended positions concerning the status of Republika Srpska, the role of the High Representative and the judicial proceedings against Dodik.
During the 2025–26 presidential election crisis in Republika Srpska, Vučić described the verdict against Dodik in extremely strong terms and said Serbia would use diplomatic and legal means to support Republika Srpska and its legitimate representatives. And this has been the pattern since the beginning.
But foreign political influence no longer requires a presidential visit. It can arrive through television screens, news portals, Facebook and Tik-Tok pages and coordinated online campaigns. Vučić and SNS have repeatedly put their media and other public facing channels to the use of Milorad Dodik and SNSD, and the favor has been returned at every possible occassion. In many occurences, this has been backed up with the generous help of the Kremlin owned media structures in Serbia.
During the 2022 Bosnian elections, pro-government media in Serbia overwhelmingly favoured Dodik and SNSD candidate Željka Cvijanović. Opposition candidate Jelena Trivić became the target of narratives portraying her as a foreign agent or traitor. Raskrinkavanje.ba documented fabricated claims, partisan media coverage, anonymous websites and social-media networks used to promote particular candidates or discredit opponents.
The pattern extends beyond individual elections. During the Republika Srpska early presidential election campaign, Raskrinkavanje and Istinomjer documented how Russian outlets RT Balkan and Sputnik Srbija amplified narratives favorable to SNSD while giving substantially less attention to its opponents.
This proves the well-established fact that Milorad Dodik has been particularly effective at turning geopolitical relationships into domestic political capital.
His meetings with Vladimir Putin, like the one he had during the pre-election campaign in BiH, have helped project the image of a leader protected by a major international power.
The political message is straightforward: voting for Dodik’s political camp is presented not simply as choosing a government, but as defending Republika Srpska against external enemies and fortifying the favorable geopolitical position of Republika Srpska. This, in these elections, has been propelled even more – constant meetings with high-ranking State Department and even White House officials have proven that Dodik and SNSD have a good standing in the current US administration.
This has been even more fortified by the news of two of prominent Trump-associated political strategists Chris LaCivita and James Blair had undertaken paid consulting work connected to Republika Srpska’s government prior to elections. The last endeavor might not be as beneficial to Dodik, as the controversy of them working in BiH in the midst of mid-term elections in the US unravels, but it does show how SNSD and Dodik build their positions.
However, in all this turmoil, the main elections “assistance” always came from Serbia. Vučić’s political support provides regional legitimacy, while Trump, Putin and others offer a broader geopolitical narrative.
Croatia – an old friend with a lot to say and ask
Croatia’s role is different, but it is no less significant.
Zagreb’s impact on BiH elections operates less through voter transportation and more through institutional lobbying, diplomatic pressure and sustained political support for HDZ BiH and its leadership.
Both Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and President Zoran Milanović have repeatedly intervened publicly on electoral reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In election year 2022, Plenković travelled to Mostar and met the leadership of the Croatian National Assembly in BiH, including Dragan Čović, arguing that electoral reform was necessary to ensure appropriate representation of the three constituent peoples, particularly Croats. In the European Parliament, he even openly linked Croatia’s support for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s EU candidacy with the need for electoral-law changes that would ensure representation of Croats.
President Zoran Milanović went even further in his rhetoric. In May 2022, he argued that Croatia should use its international position to protect Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In July 2026, only weeks before Bosnia and Herzegovina’s election campaign, Plenković met Čović again and described the upcoming elections as a major political moment for BiH. He reiterated Croatia’s support for equality and legitimate representation of the three constituent peoples, while promising continued support to Croats in BiH through investment and other projects.
Supporting the political rights of Croats in BiH is a legitimate position. The problem emerges when the political system of a neighboring country becomes an object of sustained external lobbying designed to influence constitutional arrangements, electoral rules or the composition of domestic institutions.
The distinction is therefore worth making clearly: Serbia’s influence has often been strongest through the political-media ecosystem surrounding Republika Srpska; Croatia’s has often been strongest through institutional and diplomatic channels surrounding the Croat political establishment.
Both can become problematic when the objective shifts from supporting citizens with cross-border ties to determining political outcomes inside Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Relationships go both ways – how Bosnia is returning the favor
Bosnia and Herzegovina, in its’ limited capacity and capabilities, also does have its role in interfering in other countries elections – most notably the ones of Serbia and Croatia. This is observed in a couple of ways: providing politicians from Bosnia and Herzegovina to represent other countries, provide pre-elections media support and provide votes in elections in Serbia and Croatia.
Željana Zovko is MP in the EU Parliament representing Croatia in two consecutive terms. After holding prominent roles in BiH politics as the Ambassador to several European countries and advisor to the Prime Minister, she became a Croatian politician in the EU parliament. The situation is similar with the one we see a lot in sports, when a person changes their sports citizenship and starts playing for another national team. In sports, they need to wait for 3 years before doing that, in politics, one can exchange representing interest of one country with representing the interest of another country immediately. There are some less notable examples of this, like in the case of Adam Šukalo, who was in the National Assembly of Republika Srpska from 2014 to 2018 and then in the Assembly of Serbia from 2020 to 2024.
Returning the favor of being a part of the pre-election campaigns in Serbia and Croatia, either with messages or through channels and informational infrastructure, is something that is also happening, but in scale it is much less than the other way around.
However, voting of BiH citizens is a significant matter in the political life of Croatia and Serbia. Apart from the fact that a lot of people that are born in Bosnia and Herzegovina and having the citizenship of BiH are leaving and voting in Croatia, Croatia reserves three parliamentary seats for citizens without residence in Croatia through its eleventh electoral constituency.
A large share of these voters live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, particularly in Herzegovina, and the constituency has become a reliable electoral stronghold of Croatia’s HDZ. In the 2024 Croatian parliamentary elections, HDZ won all three diaspora seats. Its successful candidates were Zvonko Milas, Dario Pušić and Radoje Vidović. There has been a debate about this arrangement in Croatia for some time, but it is a longstanding regulation.
On the other hand, controversy surrounding voters from Republika Srpska in Serbia has a recent history.
During Serbia’s December 2023 elections, election observers documented organized transportation of voters from Bosnia, particularly to Belgrade. Serbian monitoring organization CRTA reported buses, vans and gathering points used to transport voters, while opposition parties alleged that irregular residence registration enabled voters from outside Belgrade to influence the city’s local elections.
The OSCE/ODIHR subsequently highlighted serious concerns about electoral conditions, including pressure on voters, misuse of public resources and allegations surrounding organized voter transportation.
This issue, as it seems, will have a new dimension during the upcoming elections on October 25. Out of 93 voting stations outside of Serbia, 28 will be in Republika Srpska, and some of them in verz disputable locations, like Serbian M-tel building in Banja Luka. Also, the campaign of Studentska lista in Republika Srpska has been obstructed in many ways, including banning rallies. With elections being potentially very close, all this can significantly impact their outcome.
Bosnian general elections 2026: a minimum breath of fresh air
Bosnia’s October 2026 elections offer another striking development. The biometric technology and ballot scanners were implemented fully for the first time in BiH and the results already show significant improvements – results were published almost immediately, the number of complaints was lower than usual and general complaints about the integrity of elections were almost non-existent.
According to preliminary results for the state-level House of Representatives, approximately 1.42 million ballots had been processed by 14 October representing some 99% of all ballots, compared with approximately 1.73 million ballots in 2022—a difference of more than 300,000. One can argue that the decline can from an organic lower turnout, but if we consider the fact that the number of cast ballots in several previous elections from 2010 to 2022 was approximately the same, it is clear what the amount of potential manipulation with identity of voters was. And probably a majority of that occurred where it was the easiest and costless to implement – between neighboring countries.
The decline is particularly notable among two parties that have dominated the country’s ethnic power-sharing arrangements.
SNSD received approximately 255,500 votes in 2022, compared with around 222,300 in the updated preliminary 2026 count—a loss of roughly 30,000 votes.
The HDZ BiH-led coalition fell from approximately 137,300 to 107,300 votes, also a decline of about 30,000.
Changes in integrity processes can make a difference, even if potentially results of the elections don’t give out that message necessarily. The problems are multifold, but in order to even have a chance, we need to minimize the opportunities for impersonation, ballot manipulation and other irregularities.
Democracy can’t also stop at the border
The Western Balkans’ electoral problems are increasingly interconnected, and not favorable for Bosnia and Herzegovina in general.
Serbia’s political influence in Republika Srpska, Croatia’s institutional influence over Bosnian Croat politics, pro-Russian information operations and international lobbying networks all contribute to an environment in which domestic elections are shaped by external power.
At the same time, dual citizens and diaspora voters from Bosnia can influence parliamentary majorities in Croatia and electoral outcomes in Serbia.
European integration should provide a framework for addressing these problems and EU seems to be doing so by providing instruments for election integrity like European Democracy Shield.
But, in some cases, especially when the non-EU countries are concerned, it can sometimes become another instrument of leverage. This happens particularly when an EU member state uses its institutional position to advance the interests of political allies in neighboring candidate countries.
The answer is not to restrict legitimate dual citizens or treat diaspora voters as inherently suspicious. It is to establish credible voter registers, enforce residence requirements, scrutinize cross-border campaign financing, regulate political advertising transparently and strengthen independent election observation.
Above all, governments must stop treating neighboring electorates as extensions of their own political constituencies. Bosnian internal problems will probably remain there for some more time, but it also cannot consolidate its democracy while its elections remain vulnerable to political machinery operating across borders.