SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Serbs and Croats were not ready to give up their support for nationalist parties in Bosnia's second postwar municipal election.
But partial results Sunday show that most Muslim-dominated cities appear to have been won by opposition Social Democrats.International officials said overall turnout on Saturday in Bosnia's second postwar municipal election was around 70 percent.
In the Bosnian countryside and particularly in the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia, a majority of people apparently voted again for those nationalist parties that led the country to war.
Nonetheless, results indicating the rise of the opposition Social Democrats were welcomed by Thomas Miller, the U.S. ambassador to Bosnia, who spoke of "a new age and a new era" ushered in by the vote.
"We look forward to this new era and working with the people of this country," Miller said.
According to the incomplete preliminary results, the Social Democrats swept to victory in Sarajevo, the Tuzla area, the eastern city of Gorazde and in Bihac to the northwest. Zenica, another big urban center, was apparently still undecided.
Western officials said although the nationalist Serb Democratic Party and the Croatian Democratic Union were the choice of Bosnian Serbs and Croats, the Social Democrats' success in Muslim areas "creates a momentum" for parliamentary and presidential elections, scheduled for this fall.
"I look at these elections as a start of a new age, a new era not only in Bosnia-Herzegovina but throughout the region," said Miller.
Even though the international community has invested five years and $5.1 billion into reconstructing postwar Bosnia, the unemployment rate remains over 60 percent. Some 4.2 millions people still cannot return to their prewar homes mainly because of their ethnicity.
Bosnia is divided into a Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat Federation and is ruled by three nationalist parties that are seen as the main obstacles to its progress.
"But Bosnia has risen to its feet," said Zlatko Lagumdzija, who leads the Social Democrats. "This is the biggest political turn since Dayton," he said, referring to the 1995 peace agreement that ended the 31/2-year war.
Officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which supervised the elections, reported a number of minor disruptions in the election process, including a partial boycott in one divided central Bosnian city.
"Though there were some problems with voters finding their polling stations, and bad weather in parts of the country, all in all the election went well," U.S. State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said Sunday.