Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina\u2019s Serb-majority entity, votes Sunday in a snap presidential election called after electoral authorities stripped separatist Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik of the presidency in August.<\/p>\n
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\u201395 Bosnian War.<\/p>\n
The court also handed him a one-year prison sentence \u2013 which he avoided by posting bail \u2013 and banned him from participating in politics for six years. Bosnia\u2019s top court upheld that ruling in early November.<\/p>\n
In October, the National Assembly of Republika Srpska appointed Ana Trisic-Babic as an interim president until the Sunday election.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what we know about the vote, and why it matters.<\/p>\n
When are the snap Republika Srpska elections taking place?<\/h2>\n
According to Bosnia\u2019s 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, spanning the three main ethnic groups \u2013 Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats \u2013 are eligible to vote. Turnout in previous presidential elections has typically ranged between 50 percent and 55 percent.<\/p>\n
Although Trisic-Babic was appointed as an interim president, the law still requires new elections within 90 days of a president\u2019s removal.<\/p>\n
The winner of Sunday\u2019s election will serve only the remainder of Dodik\u2019s term, less than a year, until next October\u2019s general elections.<\/p>\n
When will the results be announced?<\/h2>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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What is Republika Srpska?<\/h2>\n
Republika Srpska is one of two main political entities within Bosnia, along with the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina \u2013 each of which enjoys significant autonomy. The two share equal rights over a small, third self-governing administrative unit within the country, known as the Brcko District.<\/p>\n
Republika Srpska was proclaimed by Bosnian Serb leaders in 1992 at the start of the 1992\u201395 war and was formally established as part of Bosnia\u2019s post-war constitutional structure in 1995 under the Dayton peace agreement.<\/p>\n
Republika Srpska covers about 49 percent of Bosnia\u2019s territory, while the remaining 51 percent forms the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.<\/p>\n
Republika Srpska has its own government, parliament, judiciary and police, but not its own army.<\/p>\n
Today, it is overwhelmingly Serb-populated, with Serbs making up approximately 82 percent of its residents<\/a>, alongside smaller Bosniak and Croat minorities, according to the latest census, which was held more than a decade ago in 2013.<\/p>\n Its demographics changed drastically during and after the war, and because of the ethnic cleansing of non-Serb communities.<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Its first president, Radovan Karadzic, has been sentenced to life in The Hague for the 1995 genocide against Bosniaks in Srebrenica, now a town inside Republika Srpska.<\/p>\n The elections come at a highly sensitive time for Bosnia. Since Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Republika Srpska has intensified its rhetoric to secede from Bosnia, with Dodik \u2013 a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin \u2013 increasingly calling for the entity to break away, potentially to join Serbia.<\/p>\n These elections will determine who replaces Dodik after his removal from office and his long dominance over Republika Srpska\u2019s politics. The vote is also a test of how much influence he can still exert, despite being banned from political activity.<\/p>\n There are six candidates on the ballot, four nominated by Republika Srpska\u2019s political parties, and two running as independents.<\/p>\n The main contenders are Sinisa Karan of Dodik\u2019s ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), who is directly backed by Dodik, and Branko Blanusa of the opposition Serb Democratic Party (SDS).<\/p>\n Karan is a longtime member of Dodik\u2019s inner circle and a former Republika Srpska interior minister. He serves as minister for scientific and technological development and higher education in the current Republika Srpska government.<\/p>\n According to Radio Free Europe<\/a>, he was part of a group \u2018tasked\u2019 to draft an SNSD plan for Republika Srpska to break away from Bosnia.<\/p>\n Analysts say Dodik sees Karan as an extension of his own power. Dodik has appeared prominently at Karan\u2019s rallies.<\/p>\n Blanusa, the SDS candidate, is a member of the party\u2019s Banja Luka City Committee and a professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Banja Luka.<\/p>\n The SDS, now the main opposition party in Republika Srpska, was originally led by Karadzic. It is also a Serb nationalist party and has long competed with Dodik\u2019s SNSD for the same electorate.<\/p>\n While it is critical of Dodik\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The other party-backed candidates are Nikola Lazarevic of the Ecological Party of Republika Srpska and Dragan Dokanovic of the Alliance for New Politics (SNP).<\/p>\n Two independents, Igor Gasevic and Slavko Dragicevic, are also on the ballot but have remained almost entirely outside the public eye.<\/p>\n Milorad Dodik, 66, is the former president of Republika Srpska.<\/p>\n Backed by Western governments in the late 1990s, he became the entity\u2019s prime minister in 1998 and was seen as a promising alternative to the hardline nationalist leadership of genocide convict Karadzic and the then-ruling SDS, which dominated the post-war period. Then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described Dodik as \u201ca breath of fresh air\u201d, and both the United States and the United Kingdom placed their hopes in him as a more moderate future option.<\/p>\n He was among the first leaders in Republika Srpska to acknowledge the Srebrenica genocide. In a 2007 interview with a Bosnian television outlet, Dodik, the president of SNSD since its formation, said he knew \u201cperfectly well what took place\u201d and that \u201cthere was a genocide in Srebrenica\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThat judgement was made by the court in The Hague, and that is an undeniable legal fact,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He has served three terms as president of Republika Srpska, holding two consecutive mandates from 2010 to 2018 and winning again in 2022. In 2018, he was elected as the Serb member of Bosnia\u2019s three-member presidency.<\/p>\n During this period, however, Dodik adopted a far more nationalist stance, repeatedly calling for the entity\u2019s secession, and denying the Srebrenica genocide \u2013 going back on his own earlier admissions.<\/p>\n In 2023, Dodik signed two controversial bills that, in essence, said that decisions of the Dayton Agreement peace envoy and rulings of Bosnia\u2019s constitutional court would not apply to Republika Srpska. The peace envoy and the constitutional court blocked those bills.<\/p>\n In March 2025, the constitutional court issued arrest warrants for Milorad Dodik and several of his allies on charges of undermining the constitutional order. But a month later, members of the Republika Srpska police blocked officers from the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) from entering the administrative centre of the Republika Srpska government to arrest Dodik, further intensifying tensions with Sarajevo.<\/p>\n In August, Bosnia\u2019s electoral authorities stripped Dodik of the presidency and banned him from participating in politics. He, however, remains the president of the SNSD party and continues to be its most powerful figure.<\/p>\n Yes. Bosnia as a country relies on a power-sharing system in which the two entities are closely linked. Republika Srpska\u2019s challenge against state institutions and the rise of secessionist threats can affect the stability of the country on the national level.<\/p>\nWhy are the elections important?<\/h2>\n
Who are the candidates?<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nWho is Milorad Dodik?<\/h2>\n
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Does the Republika Srpska political crisis affect Bosnia as a whole?<\/h2>\n