Bosnia Parties Fulfilled Very Few Election Promises, Report Says

Political parties that make up the majority in Bosnia's current government, the Council of Ministers, have totally fulfilled only six out of their 189 pre-election promises, says a report by a fact-checking organisation, published on Thursday.

That makes only 3 per cent of all promises, a result similar to that of the parties in the previous Council, continuing the tradition of empty campaign vows. 

Around 35 per cent of all promises in the last mandate were partially fulfilled. "The largest number of promises, 109 of them (57%), remained unfulfilled, and one was assessed as unfounded," said the report. 

The biggest number of promises was made by the Bosniak Party of Democratic Action, SDA, the report continued, noting that it fulfilled only three out of 89 promises; four others almost made it to the list. 

Four out of six fulfilled promises during the mandate were made in the field of economy, while two related to state organisation.

They related to the growth of wages and GDP per capita, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Strategy and Public Debt Management Strategy, and implementation of the Decision of the Constitutional Court for the City of Mostar, which paved the way for elections to be held in this city after almost eight years. 

The biggest party of the Bosnian Serbs, Milorad Dodik's Union of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, did not issue a specific program for the 2018 general elections. Instead, "Istinomjer gathered their promises during the election campaign from the public speeches of this party's officials," the report noted. 

The SNSD promised to stop Bosnia's further NATO integration, block the conduct of military exercises on the territory of the Bosnian Sertb entity, Republika Srpska,...