Dodik claims Bosnia election victory despite being barred from office

Milorad Dodik declared victory for his allies in Bosnia's elections though barred from the presidency for six years after a conviction for overstepping his powers and not on the ballot. With 95 percent of ballots counted, Zeljka Cvijanovic was on track to retain the Serb seat on the tripartite presidency and Savo Minic to win the Republika Srpska presidency. Dodik said his party and partners would take two-thirds of the entity's new parliament seats. Speaking in Banja Luka and at a news conference, Dodik thanked Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. He said without Trump's victory they would probably be political corpses and that the new environment made them political winners; he also thanked Putin for receiving them before the vote. Turnout fell nearly 10 points from 2022 to about 42 percent. First-time biometric ID and ballot scanning led some stations to extend hours; no major incidents were reported. Voters Merima Cerim Karisik and Amela Hadzic told AFP in a Sarajevo suburb they hoped politics of the past 30 years would ease, while doubting major change. The 1995 Dayton deal split Bosnia into Republika Srpska (about 49 percent) and a Muslim-Croat federation (about 51 percent), plus Brcko. Denis Becirovic and Darijana Filipovic led the other presidency races. No contested vote-count claims appeared in the sources. Left-rated coverage stressed pro-Russian and separatist framing and the Trump praise; no right-rated coverage was found.