Željko Komšić

Željko Komšić (Croatian pronunciation: [ˈʒɛːʎkɔ ˈkɔmʃitɕ]; born 20 January 1964) is a Bosnian Croat politician serving as the 6th and current Croat member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2018, having served from 2006 to 2014 as well. Previously, he was a member of the national House of Representatives from 2014 to 2018.

Born in 1964, Komšić earned a degree in law from the University of Sarajevo in 1988, and later attended a specialization program at Georgetown University. He served in the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian War, and was awarded with the Order of the Golden Lily. Following the war, Komšić worked at the Federal Ministry of Displaced Persons and Refugees, before being elected municipal mayor of Novo Sarajevo in 2000. He then served as the Bosnian ambassador to FR Yugoslavia. In the 2006 general election, Komšić successfully ran for a seat in the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina as the Croat member. He was re-elected to the office in the 2010 election. Komšić was a prominent figure of the Social Democratic Party, until he left it in 2012 to establish the Democratic Front a year later. Following the end of his term in the Presidency, he was elected to the national House of Representatives in the 2014 election.

Komšić was elected to the Presidency for a third term in the 2018 general election. He was re-elected for a fourth term in the 2022 general election, and has since then become the longest-serving Presidency member overall. He is also the only one to have served more than two terms.

Although elected to the post of Croat member of the tri-partitive Presidency, the vast majority of Bosnian Croats consider Komšić to be an illegitimate representative of their interests as he was elected almost exclusively 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). His legitimacy has been widely contested among the Bosnian Croat population during his third and fourth terms in particular as his support from Bosnian Croats is negligible.