Sitting in the ‘Palata predsjednika Republike Srpske’, looking out across the autumnal vista in the adjacent park, Milorad Dodik is no doubt a happy man. As the last votes from Florida came in and one by one the swing states fell to president elect Donald Trump, Dodik’s (once unlikely) plan to split Bosnia in half and declare an independent Republic of Srpska just got a shot of epinephrine.

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This week’s annual European progress report should focus on the democratic deficiencies in Serbia as well as the country’s achievements, in order to prevent backsliding towards an illiberal political system.

On Monday evening, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic addressed the nation via public broadcaster RTS and talked about the emerging surplus in the state budget, the newly-opened 40-kilometre-long highway in central Serbia, and an alleged assassination attempt against him.

What the prime minister did not talk about were issues relating to the...

20 years after the end of the war in 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is still marred by lack of political progress and stuck in the situation of stabile unresolvedness. Recurrent political crises are a sad reality, whith political leaders of the two entities and three nationalist parties continuously pushing to establish sovereignty of their geographic or imagined territories in the hope that this will secure them a permanent ruling position. Quite often, they create turmoil to avert attention from more pressing social and economic problems resulting in challenging living conditions,...

President Ivanov’s general abolition, granted on April 12 this year (to 56 persons), partially withdrawn on May 27 (only for 22 persons) and then completely withdrawn on June 6 (for the remaining 33 persons - one pardoned person, Kosta Krpac, who was actually a witness of the Special Public Prosecution, allegedly committed suicide) can be analyzed in two separate aspects: legally and socio-politically. In regard to the legal aspect, any well-informed lawyer with common legal sense can observe without doubt the continuous decadence of the entire legal reasoning behind the process that,...

In May, as Montenegro celebrates 10 years of its independence, a new government is being forged with no elections preceding it - a government that is supposed to ensure trust in the electoral process.

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This is apparently the positive outcome of several months of dialogue between the authorities and opposition, with the...