Nationalist candidates from Bosnia's Croat, Muslim and Serb communities have won the country's three-man presidency, underlining continued ethnic strains 20 years after the Balkan state's civil war.
With more than 90 per cent of votes counted on Monday, Bakir Izetbegovic of the main Muslim SDA party and Dragan Covic of the Croat HDZ BIH party had won seats in the collective presidency.
The Serb seat remained undecided, with two nationalist candidates - opposition figure Mladen Ivanic and Zeljka Cvijanovic of the Bosnian Serb ruling SNSD party - neck and neck.
The unwieldy power-sharing arrangement is part of a political system created by the US-brokered Dayton peace accord that ended the 1992-95 ethnic war in which some 100,000 people were killed.
Although Bosnia-Herzegovina has been at peace since then, Sunday's election, which also included parliamentary polls, laid bare widespread discontent over the economy and division along ethnic lines.
About 3.3 million Bosnians were eligible to vote, but turnout was 54 per cent, about two percentage points lower than in 2010 polls, reflecting widespread disenchantment with what is seen as the country's corrupt and inefficient political class.
Unemployment is running at 44 per cent and in February mass protests broke out against the government's failure to enact reforms required for Bosnia to join the European Union.
Political analyst Enver Kazaz said the slide into nationalism reflected disillusionment and would not help Bosnia fix its internal problems or speed up its EU aspirations.
"Due to lack of a competent choice and a serious political offer, citizens voted for a kind of the return to the 1990s," Kazaz said.
Today's "nationalists, those fake moderates, will not make war, but they will not hesitate to engage in political disputes" that damage the country's prospects, he said.
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