When Kazaz Meets the Bar, We Get a New Election Law

By: Rasim Belko

Dear readers, while you are contemplating whether to first make coffee or let reality caress you with uncertainty for another five minutes, Enver Kazaz, an academic of free form and fluid stances, wakes up earlier than most – somewhere between his last drink and his first political enlightenment.

This time, guided by some higher power (a blood alcohol level), he decided it was time to perform a lobotomy on democracy, and without anesthesia. His election law proposal – that marvel of political-philosophical alchemy – looks as if it was created in the interval between his second and third drink, when a person still thinks it makes sense to interpret the Constitution... out loud... to the cat... in the dead of night.

They say the HDZ proposal is bad. It is. But Kazaz's? Well, that's like a bad meal turning into salmonella. With HDZ, you know you'll be hungry for justice, but with Enver, there's a real chance that civil rights and common sense will end up in quarantine.

There's a theory – unconfirmed for now, but significantly more entertaining than reality – that Kazaz draws his genius directly from a small bottle, and that instead of coffee in the morning, he consumes a combination of Sartre, whiskey, and constitutional law. And while we ordinary people try to survive a hangover with aspirin, Enver has long since moved into the phase where he thinks he can reconstruct the state without bothering to understand how it functions.

His "proposal" – if we can call a manuscript that looks more like the result of a brainstorming session between a barman and a random guest from the diaspora – envisages changes that would bring tears to the eyes of even the most experienced lawyer. Not tears of emotion, but the kind that make your eye automatically react to an onslaught of idiocy.

Of course, it's not a sin to have an opinion. Even horoscope columnists have them. But when Enver, a man whose knowledge of the electoral system is thinner than a watered-down gemišt, starts drawing a model that would be too ethno-sensitive even for Dragan Čović, then you know someone in Sarajevo has sold their soul – for a crust of SDP's bread and a glass of coalition wine.

We can't fault his enthusiasm. He writes as if his grandfather was directly responsible for creating the January 6th dictatorship. And his model? As if it were assembled based on the philosophical question: “How can we make democracy effective, without it being recognizable?”

In an attempt to please everyone – especially those who would most like to abolish the concept of a civic state – Kazaz has crafted a proposal that would make even voters from the 14th century say: “Wait, isn't this a bit retrograde?”

But let's not be unfair – Enver is only human. A man who was told he was an intellectual, and he, unfortunately, took it seriously. And now he wanders through media spaces, like Don Quixote with rakija, fighting windmills he himself has drawn.

Therefore, dear readers, while we wait for someone serious to take electoral reforms into their hands – and we might wait for that when trams start flying – we are left to toast Enver Kazaz with our coffee: a colorful figure at the crossroads of philosophy, politics, and barroom lyricism.

Just, please... if you see him with a pen and paper, quietly take them away. And give him Sudoku. It can't hurt.