Bosnians go to the polls today for the sixth time since the end of their country’s savage war for independence. Fifteen years have passed since the end of the war; politicians have come and gone, and a new generation is in charge now, almost wholly untainted by ties to wartime aggression or atrocity. It has been a long and difficult period, but a chance for renewal and reinvention; and yet the choices Bosnians face this weekend are depressingly familiar.

Bosnian election campaigns are not fought, as other countries’ are, on issues of employment, healthcare, or education. Its politicians do not sweep to power on promises of shorter waiting lists in hospitals, or on commitments to balance the budget. No, Bosnian elections are a different beast; the topic that dominates above all others is the constitutional settlement, the question of precisely how the country should be run and, more importantly, precisely who should run it.

The country’s constitution is still the Dayton Agreement, the compromise that finally ended the war, that was fought over bitterly on a frigid US Air Force base in the winter of 1995. It was only ever meant to be a temporary solution; nobody really believed that that Bosnia, fifteen years on, would still have a constitution thrashed out at a peace conference, written in English, formulated by Americans.

But it does; and so the country is still divided, split into the two entities that were the only acceptable solution in 1995. One, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is populated mostly by Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats; the other, the Republika Srpska, is overwhelmingly Orthodox Serb. It is this clumsy and unworkable arrangement that, every four years, becomes the focus of bitter arguments among rival politicians.

Some are like the current Bosniak member of the presidency, Haris Silajdžić, who would like to see the entities abolished, replaced with a pluralistic, democratic state — a state in which, not coincidentally, the Bosniaks as the largest ethnic group would wield the greatest power. Others are like the current Prime Minister of the Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik; he wants the opposite extreme, a system in which it was the central government that was abolished and both entities were granted independence, functioning entirely separately.

It is this divide which grips the Bosnian political system, and doubly so in election season. It is simultaneously a truly divisive issue and a convenient diversion behind which to hide: why be held accountable for your failure to build roads, repair railways, or provide adequate healthcare, when you can simply point to the other entity or to the central government when the time comes for your reelection? Faced with a political divide this intractable, the status quo — equally unpalatable to all — prevails; and so, elections become a farcical process, a token gesture of ethnic affiliation that leaves the population apathetic and uninvolved.

The emergence of Fahrudin Radončić, some might argue, has subverted this, and promises a change from the norm, an election free from the same old divisions. But, if it is even a change, it is hardly for the better; the multi-millionaire property tycoon and media magnate has more than a whiff of the Berlusconi about him, with all the concomitant controversies. You wouldn’t get that impression from Bosnia’s most popular daily newspaper, Dnevni Avaz, though, which fawns incessantly over Radončić — and which Radončić, coincidentally, happens to own. If Bosnia swaps the politics of ethnic division for the politics of the oligarch, will it really be better off?

When they fill in their ballots this weekend, then, Bosnians will be faced with the same unpalatable choices they have been faced with for the last fifteen years; and so, a decade and a half after the war, Bosnia remains in a quagmire of its own politicians’ making, unable to change, facing another four years of the same.