Željko Komšić

Željko Komšić (born 20 January 1964) is a Bosnian politician serving as the 6th and current Croat member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2018.

He has also been serving as its chairman since July 2023.

He received 116,062 votes, or 39.6% ahead of Ivo Miro Jović (HDZ BiH; 26.1%), Božo Ljubić (HDZ 1990; 18.2%), Mladen Ivanković-Lijanović (NSRzB; 8.5%), Zvonko Jurišić (HSP; 6.9%) and Irena Javor-Korjenić (0.7%).

Komšić was born in Sarajevo to Bosnian Croat father Marko Komšić and Bosnian Serb mother Danica Stanić (1941 – 1 August 1992).

His mother was killed by a sniper of the Army of Republika Srpska as she sipped coffee in her apartment during the siege of Sarajevo.

According to many, this event was his breaking point, as at the time, he was enlisted in the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Komšić would go on to earn the Order of the Golden Lily, which was at the time the highest state order awarded for military merits.

His maternal grandfather Marijan Stanić, who was a Chetnik during World War II, died two years before Komšić was born.

The Stanić family hailed from the village of Kostajnica, near Doboj.

Komšić's paternal family hails from Kiseljak.

His paternal uncle was an Ustasha who disappeared during World War II.

Komšić was baptised a Catholic, like his father.

However, being a religious-skeptic, he left the Catholic Church.

He is a self-described agnostic.

Komšić has a Bachelor of Laws degree from the Faculty of Law of the University of Sarajevo.

When the "Alliance for Democratic Change" coalition came to power in 1998, Komšić was named the ambassador to the now defunct FR Yugoslavia in Belgrade.

He was a councilman of the municipality of Novo Sarajevo and in the city council of Sarajevo, before being elected the head of the municipal government of Novo Sarajevo in 2000.

He then also served as the deputy mayor of Sarajevo for two years.

He resigned this commission after the election in 2002 when SDP went back into opposition.

He was chosen to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina in selective annual Georgetown Leadership Seminar in 2003.

His wife, Sabina, is an ethnic Bosniak.

The couple has a daughter named Lana.

Komšić was one of the signatories of the Declaration on the Common Language for Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.

He is an avid supporter of Sarajevo-based football club Željezničar.

During the Bosnian War, Komšić served in the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and received the Golden Lily — the highest military decoration awarded by the Bosnian government.

After the war, Komšić embarked on a political career as a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP BiH).

Komšić already served as a member of the Presidency from 2006 to 2014 and was elected to the same office for a third term in the 2018 general election, thus becoming the second Presidency member overall, after Bosniak Alija Izetbegović, and the first, and so far only Croat member to serve more than two terms.

He was re-elected for a fourth term in the 2022 general election.

Komšić was SDP BiH's candidate for the Croat seat in the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 2006 Bosnian general election.

He was sworn into office on 6 November 2006.

Komšić's victory was widely attributed to a split in the HDZ BiH party, enabling the SDP to win a majority of the Bosniaks votes.

Croats saw Komšić as an illegitimate representative of the Bosnian Croats because he was elected mostly by Bosniak voters.

In the 2010 general election, Komšić won 337,065 votes, 60.6% of total.

He was followed by Borjana Krišto (HDZ BiH; 19.7%), Martin Raguž (HK; 10.8%), Jerko Ivanković Lijanović (NSRzB; 8.1%), Pero Galić (0.3%), Mile Kutle (0.2%) and Ferdo Galić (0.2%).

Komšić's electoral win in 2010 was highly contested by Croat political representatives and generally seen as electoral fraud.

Namely, every citizen in the Federation can decide whether to vote for a Bosniak or a Croat representative.

However, since Bosniaks make up 70% of Federation's population and Croats only 22%, a candidate running to represent Croats in the Presidency can be effectively elected even without a majority among the Croat community - if enough Bosniak voters decide to vote on a Croat ballot.

Komšić was a prominent figure of the Social Democratic Party, until he left it in 2012 to establish the Democratic Front a year later.

Although elected to the post of Croat member of the tri-partitive Presidency, many Bosnian Croats consider Komšić to be an illegitimate representative of their interests as he was elected mainly by Bosniak voters in the Federation, a Bosniak-Croat political entity which forms a majority of the country's territory and whose residents are eligible to cast ballots for both the Bosniak and Croat members of the Presidency (while the Serb member is elected by residents of the Republika Srpska entity).

Previously, he was a member of the national House of Representatives from 2014 to 2018.