On February 26, viewers across Bosnia and Herzegovina turned on their televisions expecting the usual programming from the country’s only national public broadcaster, BHRT. Instead, they were met with the following message on a black screen:
“TODAY BHRT IS NOT BROADCASTING ITS REGULAR PROGRAM.,” the message read.
This is a warning about the consequences of the lack of a systemic solution and the possible permanent shutdown of your public broadcaster.
Without an urgent decision from the competent institutions, BHRT is facing the blocking of its accounts and the cessation of performing its core function as a public service in the interest of citizens.
The news will be broadcast according to the daily schedule.”
For an entire day, the Radio and Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BHRT) — suspended its regular programming in what was effectively the final in a series of distress signals to the public and the political elites. The reason was simple and devastating: the institution that is supposed to provide information of public interest to the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina across radio, TV and digital platforms may soon cease to exist.
For many citizens, this was simply the latest episode in a familiar cycle. Every year or two, warnings emerge that BHRT is on the verge of collapse. Salaries are delayed. Court rulings pile up. Politicians promise solutions. The crisis passes, temporarily, and the story disappears — until the next financial deadline arrives.
But this time feels different.
In a country as politically and institutionally fragmented as Bosnia and Herzegovina, losing its only state-level public broadcaster would amount to more than a media failure — it would be a political and democratic one.
A literal DEADline is fast approaching
The immediate threat stems from a debt of roughly 22 million KM (~11.25 m €) owed to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) which connects and provides news and live event coverage to public broadcasters across Europe, North Africa and parts of the Middle East. If the debt is not resolved, enforcement proceedings could freeze BHRT’s accounts, effectively shutting down the institution’s operations.
That alone would be serious. Yet the EBU debt is only one piece of a much larger financial collapse.
BHRT’s total liabilities now exceed 100 million convertible marks (~51m €), including unpaid taxes, energy bills, supplier obligations, and years of unpaid pension and health contributions for employees.
For the roughly 700 people who work there, the crisis is not theoretical. It is personal.
According to the president of the BHRT workers’ union, Merima Kurtović-Pašalić, employees have spent nearly two decades living with the same question every month: Will I get my salary?
“They work in uncertainty, a kind of agony, they don’t know if and when they will get their salary and other benefits, and it’s especially terrible because we haven’t been paid our pension contributions for almost the last 10 years, so the debt to the employees is now more than 55 million KM, based on contributions.,” says Kurtović-Pašalić.
In recent years, BHRT has repeatedly attempted to show the public the conditions in which its employees work. In a November 2025 post, the broadcaster apologized for a temporary signal interruption while simultaneously revealing images of a leaking roof and severe water damage inside its headquarters.
Kurtović-Pašalić stresses the gravity of the situation: “The rest of the conditions are very difficult because we work in a building that is more than 40 years old, also our energy generators and elevators fail, and very often we are in a situation where we have to improvise even during the implementation of the program itself.”
In other words, the survival of BHRT is not just a question of media policy. It is a question of livelihoods.
The structural dysfunction behind the crisis
To understand why the crisis has become existential, one must revisit the architecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s public broadcasting system — a structure that reflects the country’s broader political reality.
Bosnia and Herzegovina operates three public broadcasters:
– Radio and Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina (state-level)
– Radio-Television of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
– Radio Television of Republika Srpska
The system was established by the Office of the High Representative in the early 00s, and was designed to unify the fragmented wartime media landscape while respecting the country’s complex political structure, using German public broadcasting, in which every federal unit has its own public broadcaster under the umbrella of a national corporation, as an example.
In theory, the financing model should be straightforward — a license fee collected from households is divided between the three broadcasters. However, in practice, it has become a legal and political battleground.
Since at least 2017, RTRS has been accused of withholding the legally mandated share of license fee revenues owed to BHRT, depriving the state broadcaster of tens of millions of euros and pushing it toward bankruptcy.
Court rulings have repeatedly confirmed that the funds should be transferred. Yet implementation has remained elusive. The result is a paradox uniquely Bosnian in its absurdity: a state institution collapsing financially because another publicly funded broadcaster refuses to transfer money required by law.
An additional strain is the collection of the license fee itself. Many Croat households do not pay the TV license fee out of what Croat parties describe as a lack of representation in Bosnian media. In fact, since 2019, a separatist Croatian “public” broadcaster, Radio-Television of Herzeg-Bosnia (RTVHB; named after the Croatian quasi-state formed during the war), has been fully operational and partially funded through donations of Croat citizens, either through a 1,00 KM donation on the Herzeg-Bosnian electrical company bill or bank transfers, as well as with the support of Croat-majority municipalities and direct support from the Republic of Croatia.
In its mission statement RTV HB states:
“In its current form, we were established in response to the lack of systematically designed and appropriately broadcast content about the history, culture, economy, education, and traditions of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina within the news programs of the components of the Public RTV system of BiH, that is, within the existing broadcasting programs in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
We are owned by 22 municipalities, cities, and cantons with a majority Croatian population. We are the only public media outlet of this kind in the Croatian language that, through its work, seeks to compensate for the lack of media space in Croatian.
We are financed through the budgets of our founders, donations, marketing activities, and domestic and international projects. The Government of the Republic of Croatia, through the Central State Office for Croats Abroad, is a major supporter of the work of RTV.”
It is clear that the tight grasp of politics has become the infrastructure on which the entirety of Bosnian and Herzegovinian society rests, including the public broadcasting system. In such an environment, BHRT has become merely collateral damage. Unlike its peers in other European countries, BHRT holds a fairly low viewership rate, likely attributed to its attempt to stay a neutral voice in an extremely polarized media ecosystem.
According to Kurtović-Pašalić, representatives from the political party Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) have consistently blocked attempts to resolve BHRT’s funding crisis in state institutions. In Bosnia’s power-sharing system, such obstruction can paralyze decision-making entirely.
Meanwhile, the mandate of BHRT’s governing board has already expired, and the parliamentary chamber responsible for confirming a new one has struggled to function due to political deadlock.
The difference is that, this time, the consequences could literally turn the lights off.
What is unfolding is no longer a recurring funding crisis that can be temporarily resolved. It is a moment of institutional paralysis that could lead to the complete collapse of a public broadcaster in a democratic European country. If that happens, the consequences will extend far beyond one media organization. The key question now is not only whether BHRT can survive, but what the democratic infrastructure of the country would look like if it does not.