Bosnia elections: Polls overshadowed by exhaustion, exodus and geopolitics as ethnic politics eclipse real problems

Picture a country that has lost nearly one in six of its citizens — roughly 600,000 people —through emigration in just ten years.

A country that has conducted only a single census since being ravaged by war in the 1990s, counting just over 3.5 million people in 2013.

A country where young people aged 20 to 29 are leaving faster than any other age group and where demographers warn of a looming population collapse because the birth rate has trailed the mortality rate every year since 2009.

But when voters here go to the polls on October 4 to elect people to the most powerful positions at both state and entity levels, the focus of the election campaign will not be on how to stop the country hemorrhaging citizens. It will — once again and for the umpteenth time — be about who is Serb, who is Bosniak, who is Croat and who supposedly threatens whom.

That fact alone says more about the state of Bosnian politics than any opinion poll could.

After the brutal 1992-95 Bosnian War, Bosnia and Herzegovina was left divided by the Dayton Peace Agreement — a compromise that stopped the killing but built ethnicity into the state's architecture as a permanent rather than a temporary fix.

Three decades on, that architecture hasn't changed, and progress has stalled completely .

The complicated constitution drafted at Dayton produced an equally complicated electoral system.