Milorad Dodik

Milorad Dodik (Милорад Додик, mîloraːd dǒdik; born 12 March 1959) is a Bosnian Serb politician serving as the 8th president of Republika Srpska since November 2022. Previously, he served as the 7th Serb member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the collective federal head of state, from 2018 to 2022. Dodik has also been serving as the president of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) since its creation in 1996, and has occupied a number of political positions in Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dodik was the prime minister of Republika Srpska from 1998 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2010, and the president of Republika Srpska from 2010 until 2018. Much like the SNSD, Dodik was initially considered as a moderate and reformist alternative to the ultranationalist Serb Democratic Party in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, Dodik and the SNSD have pursued an increasingly-Serbian nationalist and separatist line, invoking the right of the Bosnian Serbs to self-determination. His time in power has been characterised by authoritarianism, repudiation of federal Bosnian institutions, and closer connections to both Russia and Serbia. Dodik was born in Banja Luka to Bogoljub and Mira Dodik. He lived in Laktaši, where he attended elementary school. There, he played on the town's basketball team in Yugoslavia's amateur league. In 1978 he graduated from an agricultural high school in Banja Luka, after which he entered the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Belgrade, where he graduated in 1983. From 1986 through 1990, Dodik was the Chairman of the executive board of the Municipal Assembly of Laktaši. In 1990, at the first multi-party elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was elected to the Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a candidate of the Union of Reform Forces of Yugoslavia and was a political disciple of liberal reformer Ante Marković. During the Bosnian War, Dodik served as a representative in the National Assembly of Republika Srpska.