Darijana Filipovic Wins Bosnia Presidency Seat, a First
The HDZ BiH candidate won 109,168 votes on October 4, far fewer than Borjana Kristo in 2022, and Zagreb and Archbishop Vuksic have already congratulated her.
Darijana Filipovic of HDZ BiH will be the first woman to hold the Croat seat on the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to results of the October 4 general elections with more than 95 percent of polling stations counted. The other half of the result matters for Serbia and Republika Srpska: Zeljka Cvijanovic of the SNSD, with 285,062 votes, and Denis Becirovic of the SDP both stay on the three-member Presidency, which makes Filipovic its only new member.
How many votes did Filipovic win?
According to Klix and Danas, Filipovic received 109,168 votes, or 46.56 percent, with 95.52 percent of polling stations processed. Behind her is Slaven Kovacevic, the candidate of Zeljko Komsic’s Democratic Front, with 71,568 votes, and third is the independent Zdenko Lucic, the Croatian Five candidate, with 53,724. In a later count, at 95.93 percent of polling stations, Danas reports 108,952 votes for Filipovic and 71,429 for Kovacevic.
The figures are below the 2022 result. HDZ BiH ran Borjana Kristo then, and she won more than 180,000 votes, while Komsic took 227,540. Danas gives three reasons for the weaker showing: lower turnout, a second candidate from the Croat opposition, and the fact that Kovacevic did not win the Bosniak voters’ support that Komsic once had.
Other winners also lost ground. Cvijanovic had 327,720 votes in 2022 and now has 285,062, but she still won more than her two challengers combined, Marinko Bozovic of the SDS and Nebojsa Vukanovic of the For Justice and Order movement. Becirovic won about 120,000 fewer votes than four years ago.
Who is Darijana Filipovic?
She was born in 1987 in Mostar and grew up in Stolac, where she finished high school. Like her twin sister Andrijana Katic, the federal minister of transport and communications, she graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Mostar. She is married.
She has been in politics for fifteen years, starting in the HDZ BiH youth wing: in 2011 she became secretary of the party’s youth organization in the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton, and four years later a member of the party presidency and its secretary for organization and membership. She has been an HDZ BiH vice president since 2019. She served in the House of Representatives of the Federation of BiH Parliament from 2014 to 2018, then in the House of Representatives of the BiH Parliamentary Assembly, and won that seat again in 2022 as a list leader. She now chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee and is a delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, in the European People’s Party group.
One of her main campaign themes was criticism of how the previous Croat member of the Presidency was chosen. HDZ BiH claims that Komsic, who won the office four times, won with the votes of large numbers of Bosniaks. Komsic and the Democratic Front reject this, and Filipovic described their candidate Kovacevic in the campaign as a continuation of the same political line. HDZ BiH unanimously chose her as its candidate in April, and Andrej Plenkovic backed her at a party rally before the vote, as we reported earlier.
What did she say in her victory speech?
Filipovic thanked voters, and in particular the ruling party in Croatia:
“I especially want to thank the sister party, the HDZ of the Republic of Croatia, and its president, Mr. Andrej Plenkovic, for the support that came to us.”
To her sister, whom she addressed by the family nickname Nana, she said: “Without Nana I would not be who I am, nor would I be in this place today.” She publicly apologized to her husband, as reported by N1 BiH, “for all the lunches we did not eat together, for the vacation we did not have and for all the gatherings I was late for.”
On the start of her term, according to Klix, she said: “I will not promise in a hundred days things that take four years.”
How did Zagreb and Archbishop Vuksic react?
Croatia’s political leadership welcomed the win the same day. Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandrokovic, who is also an HDZ official, called her victory “an exceptional step in the political life of BiH” in an October 5 statement and added:
“This finally ensures the participation of a truly legitimate representative of Croats in the work of the three-member state Presidency.”
Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, also the HDZ president, congratulated her on X in the night after the vote: “From tonight, the Croat people in BiH have a legitimate representative in this institution.” The government in Croatia has contested the legitimacy of Komsic’s mandates for years, precisely because of Bosniak votes, and in the Federation of BiH each voter can cast a ballot for a candidate for only one of the two seats, Bosniak or Croat.
Vrhbosna Archbishop Tomo Vuksic also sent congratulations, writing: “In the Presidency you will from now on represent Croats and promote and protect their rights and dignity.” He also sent congratulations to the elected Bosniak and Serb members of the Presidency.
