Thirty days of parties, a year of watchdogs: Bosnia’s 2026 election on Facebook and Instagram

Bosnia’s electoral law allows campaigning in the thirty days before the vote, and on Meta most of the party money waited for it. From October 2025 to the opening of the campaign on 4 September 2026, parties and candidates spent $149.5K on political ads. In the thirty days that followed they spent $523.6K.

Over the summer their pages launched about $1.4K of ads a week. During the campaign, about $116.6K a week, 86 times as much. After the vote it fell back to $917.

The rest of the archive did not follow that calendar. Portals, fact-checkers and NGOs spent $363.2K before the campaign and $51K during it: for most of the year, political advertising in Bosnia and Herzegovina is theirs.

Before 4 September covers the year from 1 October 2025. Meta reports an ad’s spend over its whole life, so it counts in the week the ad started.

Meta returned 25,798 ads delivered in Bosnia and Herzegovina under its political and issue label since 1 October 2025. A classifier set aside 5,229 as commercial or unrelated and 1,511 as foreign politics, such as news about Serbia or Croatia reaching BiH in the shared language. The 18,981 that remain were paid for by 502 declared funders on 577 pages.

Over the year, portals, fact-checkers and NGOs paid for 39% of the money; parties and politicians for 59%. Several of the largest pages are watchdogs, fact-checkers and portals, not parties.

The largest advertisers

All 577 pages, with search and filters: every advertiser (CSV). Every party and candidate also has its own page: parties and candidates.

Page types and parties come from a model reading each ad against a registry of parties and candidates; a candidate’s own page counts for their party.

The 27 parties below ran ads from their own pages or their candidates’. Together they spent $431.5K in the thirty-day campaign. Money and seats barely line up: the parties that dominate the parliaments were not the ones that dominated Meta.

Spend is the midpoint of Meta’s ranges, in US dollars. Seats: the state House of Representatives (42), the Federation House of Representatives (98) and the RS National Assembly (83), as determined by the CIK on 24 October 2026. Per vote is campaign spend divided by the party’s votes for the state House, shown for the 16 parties that won seats there. Pokret Sigurna Srpska includes PDP, which ran on its list.

Four races had a single winner: the Bosniak, Croat and Serb members of the Presidency, and the president of Republika Srpska. The spend below is what each candidate’s own pages ran; party pages campaigning for them are counted under the party.

Presidency, Bosniak member. Denis Bećirović won with 38.1%; their own pages spent $3.7K. Bakir Izetbegović spent the most, $9.6K, for 34.14%.

Presidency, Croat member. Darijana Filipović won with 47.28%; their own pages spent $6.4K.

Presidency, Serb member. Željka Cvijanović won with 55.56% without a single ad from their own page. Marinko Božović spent the most, $2.3K, for 26.37%.

President of Republika Srpska. Savo Minić won with 52.1%; their own pages spent $2K. Bogdan Jovanović spent the most, $10.2K, for 0.78%.

Votes and shares are the CIK count. A candidate without a registry entry has no page attributed and shows no ads. The RS president table lists the two leading candidates and the others who ran ads.

Of 17,689 ads with text to read, 31% attack someone and 39% promote a party or candidate. The most frequent topics are corruption & governance, candidate profile, and infrastructure.

Tone by party

Spend by script

Topics and tone are classified by a model; an ad can carry several topics. Targets are as the ad names them. Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are one language for this count, split by script: Cyrillic is mostly Republika Srpska’s campaign.

Public bodies spent $20.2K on ads Meta filed as political, among them the Central Election Commission, municipalities and the international missions: EUFOR and the OSCE Mission are counted here, like government.