PROBLEMS WITH IMPLEMENTATION OF LOCAL ELECTION RESULTS

Squaring the Circle of Banja Luka City Assembly

AIM Banja Luka, 19 December, 1997

Not even after the sixth attempt did the city of Banja Luka get a mayor, and once again it proved that resolution of this problem is equal to squaring the circle. The election roulette led to blockade of the largest city of Republica Srpska, its city assembly and executive authorities at the very beginning of the process of implementation of local elections results, and just two months before early parliamentary elections. The city is completely handiccaped by the stale-mate of several political parties which, for three months, have not been able to reach an agreement about distribution of posts - the mayor's, his deputies and the executive council with its members.

By the will of the voters, the 70 deputy seats prescribed by the city Statute were distributed as follows: the Socialist Party of RS (SP RS) and the Serb Party of Krajina and Posavina (SSKiP) won 12 seats each (the Socialists won more votes for "half" a seat, which gave them certain, at least moral, advantage), the Coalition for Banja Luka consisting of the party of Independent Social Democrats, the National Party, the Democratic Party for Banja Luka and Krajina and the Democratic Patriotic Party, has won 8 seats, the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) has 7, the Serb Patriotic Party SPAS has 5, the Serb Radical Party won 4, the Party of Serb Unity 1 seat, and the parties from B&H Federation have 13 deputies (Party of Democratic Action 6, Party for B&H 3, and the Croat Democratic Community 4). The situation is additionally complicated by another two facts - first, that out of the seven deputies of the SDS, four have "changed colours" and joined the newly founded Serb National Alliance headed by Biljana Plavsic, which did not particiapte in the local elections in September 1997, and second, that the Coalition for Banja Luka consists of three parties relations of which are burdened by numerous mutual problems.

As soon as the local elections were completed it was clear that establishment of city authorities would be difficult, and even impossible. In ideal conditions for a simple majority of 36 votes needed for adoption of any of the submitted proposals, votes of at least four parties were needed. In worse combinations, it would be necessary to have an even larger number of parties vote in favour of certain proposals. In view of the program commitments of some of the parties, their practice exhibitted during two (and some even three) election campaigns last year and this year and putting it all in the ratio with the number of votes won, it was truly difficult to expect that administration of the city of Banja Luka would be established easily.

A few multi-party negotiations failed to yield fruit. The Socialist Party had the right of the first proposal, thanks to its (tight) victory and it used it by offering Nebojsa Radmanovic, the head of its Banja Luka city party organization and the first candidate on its list of deputies. This proposal got lost in the "voting arithmetic" imposed by the Serb Party of Krajina and Posavina and its leader Predrag Lazarevic. The political "arithmetic" consisted of the strategy in which voting was by secret ballot (as prescribed by the Statute) but in which everything was obvious to the public, so that the deputies voted one by one, by circling one of the names on the ballot and putting it into the ballot-box. The aim of such a procedure was to prove the union of the Socialist Party of RS with the parties from B&H Federation, which was for SKiP an argument against the Socialists. In this struggle some went too far, so that Professor Lazarevic, for instance, added "apples and oranges" by saying that parties of the "centre and the right" form a majority and that it was "only natural" for the mayor to be from among them, and not from the minority left.

When SSKiP, "using its right of the second move", offered Prof. Dr Aleksandar Iliskovic as its candidate for the mayor, this "natural majority" of the centre and the right did not succeed in providing the "voting majority". That is how the city assembly was once again left without its "primus inter pares". To make things even more complicated, there were proposals to nominate again the "war" mayor Predrag Radic, but as the Statute did not permit it, an amendment was drafted. Since the procedure for passing the amendment is complicated, the idea was quickly abandoned, but there were rumours about a secret alliance between Radic and Lazarevic agreed before the elections, because many had believed that the former mayor of Banja Luka would win more votes than the candidate of SSKiP. Since the results of the local elections were quite unexpected, it was convenient even for Lazarevic's SSKiP that the Statute prevented the proposal of Radic and thus enabled pacifying of the growing discontent within its own ranks.

When after numerous inter-partisan negotiations, the agreement was finally reached that SSKiP should propose the candidate for the mayor, and the SP RS for the president of the executive council, the proposal was supported by 34 out of the needed 36 votes. Then it became clear that there was no "party discipline" in some of the partes and that a different approach was necessary in resolving the assembly crisis of the city of Banja Luka. Much was expected from a protocol signed by the "magnificent four" - SP RS, SSKiP, Democratic Patriotic Party and Serb Patriotic Party, the sum of which could enable election of the mayor, establishment of the city government and all the other aithorities. But, after five unsuccessful sessions of the city assembly, the Socialist Party withdrew its signature on this protocol and Banja Luka remained where it had been before the beginning.

It is not as difficult to explain the problem of local authorities of Banja Luka as it is to solve it. The struggle for the post of the mayor is in fact the struggle for appearance in the media without any true responsibility. The post of the president of the executive council means grabbing a hot potato. But, even those who would have the strength and the knowledge to come to grips with the problems, would hardly agree to do it for less than a year, especially because the tedious process of establishing the authorities is using the precious short time, because it is expected that new local elections will be organized in September 1998 at the latest.

The Serb National Alliance, having won a large number of votes, caused confusion in parliamentary elections. Some parliamentary parties in the former (dissolved) national assembly of RS, like SSKiP and the Serp Patriotic Party (SPAS) experienced a real debacle and were left without deputies. The Socialist Party of RS won nine seats in the parliament. The joint characteristic of ones and the others is that they won much less votes than in the local elections two months prior the parliamentary. The loss of votes, among other, is attributed to haggling and bargaining about distribution of posts in Banja Luka, where majority of the parties clearly showed that struggle for power was much more important for them than what they had incorporated in their programs.

And when it was expected that losers in the republican elections would permit the parliamentary parties to establish the authorities in the city, they even more ardently grabbed their political opportunity called the city. The situation got into such a scrape that a solution became quite uncertain.

The Serb Democratic Party and the Serb Radical Party are striving to draw the greatest advantage for themselves from this situation, by letting the victors prove their failure in their absence. For Banja Luka, which has no heating, with its economy dead and buried, with 40 thousand pensioners, the city of youth in which schools are regularly on strike, it is no consolation that similar things are happening in developed democracies. The city needs those who will be able to move it towards progress. As it is, the city is operating only by force of inertia and without authorities.

Dejan Novakovic