Nationalists Ahead as Bosnia Presidency Votes Counted
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Nationalist candidates of Bosnia's Croats, Muslims and Serbs were ahead in the race for the country's tripartite presidency, partial results showed early Monday.
Bakir Izetbegovic, head of the main Muslim SDA party, looked set to win his second term as the Muslim member of the joint presidency.
Izetbegovic, son of Bosnia's late wartime leader Alija Izetbegovic, won 33.16 percent of the votes, according to results based on almost 77 percent of ballots counted, AFP reported.
His main opponent, local media mogul Fahrudin Radoncic, garnered 26.67 percent, the early results from the electoral commission showed.
Zeljka Cvijanovic and Dragan Covic were leading the race for the Serb and Croat member of the presidency respectively, both from nationalist parties.
However, race between them and their main opponents was a bit tighter.
Apart from the tripartite presidency, some 3.3 million Bosnians were eligible to vote on a new central parliament in Sunday's general election.
They were also electing assemblies of the two semi-autonomous halves that make up Bosnia since its 1990s war -- the Muslim-Croat Federation and the ethnic Serb Republika Srpska. The two are linked by weak central institutions.
Ethnic Serbs were also voting for a president of their entity.
Partial results for the central parliament, entities' assemblies and the Bosnian Serb presidency would be announced on Monday afternoon, the electoral commission said.
But Izetbegovic, 58, convinced of the victory of his SDA party said early Monday it would be a "leading force" in the country and a "basis for all future coalitions" to form a government.
The voting was held amid mounting social discontent over endemic corruption, ethnic disputes and economic woes that have troubled Bosnia's rapprochement with the European Union.
