# Dodik Ally Leads Snap Republika Srpska Presidential Vote, Extending SNSD Grip
*Event date: 2025-11-23*
By IO Digest Desk
A close ally of Milorad Dodik appeared to win Republika Srpska’s snap presidential election on November 23, 2025, preserving the dominance of Dodik’s Alliance of Independent Social Democrats even after the former Bosnian Serb leader was stripped of office and barred from politics. Preliminary results reported by Al Jazeera showed Sinisa Karan ahead with 50.89 percent of the vote, while opposition challenger Branko Blanusa of the Serb Democratic Party stood at 47.81 percent.
The election commission said the figures were based on 92.87 percent of counted ballots and that turnout reached 35.78 percent among roughly 1.2 million eligible voters. The narrow but clear margin suggested that Dodik’s political network remained highly effective despite his removal from office. The new president’s mandate will last for less than a year because a general election is already scheduled for the following October, making the vote both a leadership contest and a test of whether Dodik’s influence could outlast his formal disqualification.
Dodik was ousted after a Bosnian court convicted him of disobeying the orders of Christian Schmidt, the international High Representative who oversees implementation of the 1995 Dayton Accords. Al Jazeera reported that he was barred from politics for six years and stepped aside as president while remaining head of the SNSD. His conflict with Schmidt had become one of the defining disputes in Bosnia’s postwar order, with Dodik repeatedly declaring the High Representative’s decisions illegal in Republika Srpska and continuing to advocate eventual separation from Bosnia.
Karan did little to distance himself from that legacy. Speaking after the vote, he pledged to continue Dodik’s policies “with ever greater force,” while Dodik called the win unquestionable and told supporters he would remain in the fight for their political goals. Those statements reinforced the view that Karan’s victory was not a break with the previous administration but a vehicle for preserving it under a different officeholder.
The opposition did not accept the process without challenge. The SDS said it would ask for voting to be repeated at three polling stations, citing major irregularities. Whether those objections could alter the final result appeared doubtful based on the numbers reported, but the complaint added another layer of dispute to a system already shaped by competing claims of legitimacy between domestic leaders and international overseers.
Bosnia’s institutional structure remains central to the meaning of the election. The Dayton settlement ended the 1992-95 war by dividing the country into two entities: Republika Srpska and a second entity jointly run by Bosniaks and Croats, both tied together by a central state. That arrangement stopped a conflict that killed more than 100,000 people, but it also created a system in which disputes over autonomy, sovereignty and international supervision never fully disappeared.
Karan’s apparent win therefore matters beyond a single office. It shows that Dodik’s brand of Bosnian Serb politics remained electorally potent even after a court ruling removed him personally. At the same time, the short mandate means the result may function less as a long-term settlement than as a holding action ahead of the next general election, when the same questions about Bosnia’s unity, outside oversight and separatist pressure are likely to return with even greater force.
