The struggle lasted 13 months, but soon Bosnia-Herzegovina has a new government: The three-member state presidency of the country commissioned on Tuesday the Bosnian Serb Zoran Tegeltija with the formation of the new Cabinet.
Tegeltija comes from the SNSD party of Milorad Dodik, who belongs to the state presidency since the election in October 2018 and the policy in the Serbian part of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska (RS) determined. There Tegeltija was former Minister of Finance.
The formation of a government had been particularly protracted because the political forces in the RS were opposed to the signing of a work program with NATO aimed at bringing Bosnia into the North Atlantic Alliance. The Bosniak and Croat parties are in the Balkan country more or less divided between the three ethnic groups for future NATO accession.
With the nomination of Tegeltija, the adoption of the NATO work program now seems to be sealed. The pro-Russian Dodik, from whose party the designated head of government is coming, apparently had to give up his resistance.
Bosnia's complicated governance structure after the peace agreement
The three-member presidency received the ambassadors of several NATO countries, including Germany and the USA, on the same day, reported the Bosnian news portal "klix.ba".
In addition to Dodik, the body that acts as the collective head of state includes the Bosniak Muslim Sefik Dzaferovic and the Croatian Zeljko Komsic.
Bosnia has had a very complex governmental and administrative structure since the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995. The agreement ended a bloody three-year civil war with around 100,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of displaced people. The division of the country into a Muslim-Croatian and a Serbian half, as well as further subdivisions into cantons with their own governments, threatens to paralyze the entire state again and again.