Demonstrations in Bosnia force Prime Minister to offer early elections.

[pampango]

Sarajevo anti-government rallies force Nermin Nikšić to offer snap elections

The protests that began spontaneously in the northern town of Tuzla a week ago have quickly spread to the capital, Sarajevo, and other large urban areas, drawing in workers, students and war veterans with a wide range of grievances.

The protesters have become organised, rallying behind a set of common grievances, focused on dissatisfaction with the entire political class and Bosnia's cumbersome, dysfunctional and disproportionately expensive government structure. There are even signs that the protests could jump Bosnia's postwar boundaries and spread into the Serb-run half of the country.

In Sarajevo, a protest meeting was called for Wednesday to agree a new platform of demands. Nermin Nikšić, the federation prime minister, has shrugged off calls for his government to resign, but under the increasing pressure of protests has offered to call snap elections.

Although the majority of the protests have so far been in mostly Bosniak (Muslim) areas, Vesovic rejected the suggestion of there being an ethnic dimension to the demonstrations. "In Bosnia, finally, the nationalist narrative of the political parties has been swallowed by social narrative on the streets," he said. A banner at the demonstrations mocked Bosnia's dominant ethnocentric politics, declaring: "I am hungry in three languages."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/12/sarajevo-anti-government-niksic-elections-bosnia-herzegovina