The former president of Republika Srpska at Mar-a-Lago

The second edition of the CPAC Circle Retreat and Gala, currently taking place at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, will go down in history not only because of the timing that saw it take place just a few days before the mid-term elections – which proved catastrophic for the Republican Party. Of course, this annual gathering of US conservatives – which brings together politicians, donors and supporters of the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement – will also serve to highlight the scale of the internal rift triggered by the election, which risks overshadowing President Donald Trump’s leadership. However, a particularly controversial international political leader has also made his way to Florida: the former President of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Republika Srpska), Milorad Dodik.

It must be said, he is not the only one, given that Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian president Jair – who is in prison for an attempted coup – also made an appearance at Mar-a-Lago, and that he recently fled to the United States following Lula da Silva’s victory in the South American country’s elections. The past few weeks have been particularly packed with electoral events around the world, and the Balkan leader too has arrived on American soil following not one, but two elections that have affected the region. The first, in early October, saw nationalist movements triumph in Republika Srpska, foremost among them Dodik’s own party, which is pushing for the separation of the territorial entity from Bosnia. The second, at the end of the month, came as a cold shower for that political circle, given that the parliamentary elections in Serbia saw the victory of the student movement and a heavy defeat for former President Aleksandar Vučić, who is very close to Dodik.

He has embarked on his trip to the United States against a regional backdrop that offers him little peace of mind, given that representatives of the Student List – which triumphed in Belgrade – have yet to clarify their position on the demands of the Serbian minority in Bosnia. There is no doubt, however, that Dodik owes a great deal to Donald Trump, and his visit to Mar-a-Lago could be linked to a desire to cover his back ahead of the 2028 US presidential elections. The Bosnian Serb leader has seen first-hand just how closely his fate is tied to the political leanings of the administration in power at the White House: indeed, it was thanks to Trump that the sanctions against Dodik were lifted in October 2025 – sanctions that had first been imposed by Barack Obama in 2017 and extended by Joe Biden in 2022 due to his various separatist initiatives and activities, which risked plunging the situation in the Balkans into crisis once again. The lifting of the sanctions is also the result of the millions of dollars spent over the last two years on lobbying by the government of the Republika Srpska to bolster Dodik’s reputation in the corridors of power in the US.

A potential Democratic victory in the 2028 elections – or, in any case, the rise to power of a figure less inclined to turn a blind eye to the aggressive stance of the territorial entity’s nationalist parties – could see Dodik return to being a pariah in Washington, as he was until just a few years ago. The former president of Republika Srpska is, moreover, very close to Russian leader Vladimir Putin: the two meet very frequently, including at the Kremlin, and Dodik is a supporter of Moscow’s stance on the conflict with Ukraine, a stance reciprocated with all-round support.

His presence at Mar-a-Lago, therefore, could lend credence to those who view the outcome of the mid-term elections as a further risk factor on the international front. Trump’s closeness to such controversial figures could, in fact, confirm the argument of those who maintain that the next two years will see an American president who is even more active and unpredictable on the international stage, given that his hands will be tied on the domestic front. In this specific case, legitimising a leader such as Dodik could serve to try to remove him from Russian influence, but with the side effect of increasing his room for manoeuvre and thus implicitly favouring Moscow’s strategic interests in the Balkans.