SARAJEVO (Bosnia and Herzegovina), February 21 (SeeNews) – The lower house of Bosnia’s central parliament re-appointed late on Wednesday the country’s central government led by Prime Minister Nikola Spiric, Bosnia’s public broadcaster BHRT reported.
The central cabinet was functioning as a caretaker government after Spiric resigned as prime minister of Bosnia last November to protest legislative changes introduced by the international community aiming to streamline the country’s cumbersome central institutions.
Following the successful solution of the crisis, Spiric was re-appointed prime minister in December and proposed the same government list to parliament.
Twenty-nine out of 40 present deputies voted in favour of Spiric’s cabinet on Wednesday, three were against and eight abstained, BHRT reported.
The cabinet required a formal parliamentary approval.
War-divided Bosnia consists of a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic, each with its own parliament and government. Bosnia also has a weaker central parliament and government. The European Union has said the central-level institutions should be strengthened if the country is to become a member of the bloc one day.
Spiric’s resignation in November led to one of Bosnia’s biggest political crises since the end of the 1992-95 war, as Bosnian Serbs saw the changes as eating away at their autonomy and leverage power in the central institutions. But after more than a month of political squabble, Bosnian leaders and the top international peace envoy in Bosnia Miroslav Lajcak, who initiated the changes, reached a mutually acceptable agreement, thus opening the way for the country to establish closer ties with the EU.
Last December Bosnia initialled a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU, the first step to membership in the bloc. The EU has demanded that the country implement a key reform to unify its ethnically divided police force in order to sign the agreement later this year.