Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina ? For the first time since the war, Bosnia conducted elections without international supervision Saturday a test of whether the ethnically divided nation can run its own affairs.

Lidija Korac, head of the election commission, said Bosnia had passed that test.

“These were successful elections,” she told a news conference.

Preliminary results were not expected until today, with official results coming Oct. 22. Forming a ruling coalition could take several more weeks.

The results will be crucial to Bosnia’s future: Diplomats have warned that Western cooperation and the huge amounts of foreign aid Bosnia depends on is tied to voters picking pro-Western reformers instead of hard-line nationalists.

Political parties here are largely divided into nationalist ones that want to deepen the country’s split along ethnic lines and moderate parties that seek to unify it and wash away ethnic divisions.

Voting appeared to go smoothly Saturday in the two mini-states that make up Bosnia, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb republic. Most polling stations closed at 7 p.m., but some remained open a bit longer to accommodate voters waiting in line.

Two Bosnian Muslim girls pass next to elections posters in downtown Sarajevo. Bosnia's general elections were Saturday and will determine who will lead the country for the next four years.

Turnout was 55 percent, lower than the 64 percent recorded last time. Still, Robert Beecroft, chief for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Bosnia, called the figure “a matter of great satisfaction.”

Since the 1992-1995 war, elections have been organized by the international administrators who hold ultimate sway in Bosnia.

There were plenty of candidates to choose from more than 7,000 candidates from 57 parties and nine coalitions for assemblies on the levels of the nation, the mini-states and localities, and 35 candidates for the three-member multiethnic presidency.

Nationalists representing the three ethnic groups Muslims, Serbs and Croats ruled the country for much of the decade since independence but were pushed into opposition on the national level in 2000.

They remain strong, however, and may get a second look in Saturday’s voting because Bosnians’ everyday lives haven’t improved much. Croat and Serb nationalists want to divide Bosnia along ethnic lines, while Muslim nationalists promote Muslim interests in a unified country.

Both the nationalists and their opponents say they want to create prosperity by aligning Bosnia closer to Western Europe.