Living Cities: Making sense of Bosnia’s local elections

A conversation on what makes a livable city.
By FEDERICA DI SARIO
With AITOR HERNÁNDEZ-MORALES and GIOVANNA COI
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Happy Thursday, city-lovers!
It’s Federica, trading my usual climate beat to bring you the latest from the urban space while Aitor is on holiday.
Ahead of this Sunday’s local elections in Bosnia, this week we chat with High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina Christian Schmidt, who has carried out a major electoral reform to overcome the divisions that linger 30 years after the end of the war.
Further down, we dig into the upcoming local elections in Brussels, where one candidate has shocked the public by ridiculing a parade organized by people with disabilities.
BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA LOCAL ELECTIONS FACE REFORM TEST: Wide-ranging municipal elections will be held in Bosnia and Herzegovina this Sunday — and they will decide who will govern more than 140 municipalities across the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska.
Why it matters: This year’s local elections will be the first after a sweeping electoral reform adopted in March introduced electronic voting machines to clamp down on electoral fraud. The reform also bars convicted war criminals from running for local office — a potentially explosive issue in a country where it’s not uncommon to see sentenced criminals elected as mayors. 
To make sense of these elections, Aitor and I sat down with Christian Schmidt, the high representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the main architect of the electoral reform, to discuss how these changes will influence the country’s fragile democracy.
Background: About 30 years after the end of the Bosnian War, the country remains haunted by political instability reflecting a fractured society, where power is still shared among the main ethnicities: Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croatians. The role of the high representative — representing the international community — was created in 1995 under the Dayton Peace Agreement, which marked the end of the war.
Waging war on vote-rigging: The new package, primarily comprising a string of technical reforms aimed at enhancing the voting system’s transparency, is intended to clamp down on electoral fraud — a systematic feature of Bosnian elections. “We’ve learned that there’s a system called the Bulgarian train, where, with only one ID card, you can vote in several polling stations,” explained Schmidt, flagging that the system concerned all political parties. “People have no trust in their political class,” he said. “If we want to raise confidence in voting and democracy, we have to do something.”
Keeping war criminals away from office: Another crucial element of the reform led by the diplomat: a clause barring war criminals from running for office. For Schmidt, the ban will be mainly “symbolic” and will help avoid further suffering for the victims of the war. The odds of having a convicted war criminal running for office aren’t all that long in Bosnia: In Velika Kladuša, a village neighboring Croatia, Fikret Abdic, who ran a concentration camp during the war, has been elected mayor twice. 
Expectations? Schmidt said he expected the reform to “make a difference,” but that only time would tell: “We will see the details of how this will work out on the spot.” Yet, he stressed that “you cannot get a full rollout in an election” and that Sunday’s vote should rather be seen as “Phase One” of an inevitably longer implementation.
RING RAGE: Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s plan to reduce the speed limit on the capital’s main ring road to 50 kilometers per hour has kicked off a war between the capital and France’s new right-leaning government. Read Victor’s story here.
DELIVERING ON CLEAN DELIVERIES: Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Oxford are the only three European cities that have launched zero-emission zones for freight (ZEZ-F), the Clean Cities Campaign reports. Online shopping is driving the growth of urban logistics, and such deliveries threaten to worsen congestion and pollution problems in city centers. According to the report, vans and trucks comprise only 13 percent of vehicles on EU roads — but contribute more than half of nitrogen oxide emissions and 40 percent of greenhouse gases from road transport. 
THIS OLD HOUSE: Porto’s municipal government is rehabilitating the city’s oldest house for use as affordable housing. Over the past 700 years, the squat stone dwelling known as the Casa do Beco dos Redemoinhos has been used alternately as clergy housing, hay storage and a bordello; local authorities said their decision to recover the currently derelict space reflected their commitment to get vacant properties into the affordable rental market and “return spaces with history to the city.”
RED VIENNA STAYS RED: The far right won big in last Sunday’s national elections in Austria, coming first in nearly every small town in the country. Reflecting a significant urban-rural divide, however, the Austrian Socialists won in every major city, including Vienna, where the left-wing party has now earned the most votes in every election since 1919.
MADRID HITS BACK AT LOW-EMISSIONS ZONE RULING: Madrid said it would challenge a ruling by the High Court of Justice that asked to scrap three low-emission zones in the city center, Cities Today reports.
Leyla and Paul are back again with another musical offering, and with Bosnia’s local elections just days away, this time they’ve gone national.
“We’re making the leap from city to country this week, dipping our toes in the soundscapes of Bosnia, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of a rich and varied folk tradition, a unifying constant amid a turbulent history,” they tell us. “So, here’s a cross-section of everything from Sevdalinka — nominated for a spot on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage — to the present-day noisemakers packing dance floors, all with a delicious Balkan twist.”
RIDICULING EQUAL RIGHTS: The local election campaign in the Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek heated up this week after Reformist Movement (MR) candidate Xavier Mezquita shocked the public by taking aim at people with disabilities. Reacting to news that a local organization was planning to hold a parade of people in wheelchairs to highlight the enormous obstacles they face while navigating local streets, Mezquita ridiculed the initiative, writing that Schaerbeek would next have to hold “a parade for the visually impaired, a walk for left-handed people and a swimming marathon for asthmatics … When will the competition for the most beautiful rat take place?”
Unimpressed: The liberal candidate’s words ignited a firestorm of criticism. The green Ecolo party called Mezquita’s statement “shocking and likely illegal.” His own party’s local leader, Audrey Henry, said his words were “clumsy” and did not reflect “her opinion.” Benoît Gérard, director of local NGO Riga Solidaire et Inclusif, which organized the parade in Schaerbeek, said that “discrediting an initiative set up to demand the rights of people with disabilities to a suitable environment means denying the problem of 30 percent of the population of Brussels who are faced with reduced mobility and public spaces that are not always suitable.”
What is inclusion? In a telephone interview with Living Cities, Mezquita apologized and said he had spoken awkwardly but also reaffirmed his critiques toward the parade. “It’s a question of inclusion,” he insisted. “We believe in a municipality and a region that is inclusive for everyone, and not just for people in wheelchairs or people who are visually impaired, or people who are of such and such a belief or such and such an origin.” Mezquita suggested that events that focus on the rights of groups — like that of people with disabilities — fostered division. “We don’t want to make differences in relation to origin, in relation to beliefs or in relation to differences.”
Too little, too late: Gérard said his group “take[s] note” of Mezquita’s apology but added that “the damage is done and the doubt as to his true intentions persists.”
Named and shamed: Nadia Hadad, a Brussels resident and a member of the executive committee of the European Disability Forum, said Mezquita should be “ashamed about discriminating against people and diminishing their dignity.” She pointed out that the bloc’s commissioner-designate for equality, Belgium’s Hadja Lahbib, was from Mezquita’s party, and lamented that MR, which won the most votes in June’s regional elections in Brussels, was willing to endorse a candidate who “shows such disdain for people from marginalized communities.”
While some have called for Mezquita to not stand in the upcoming elections, the candidate said the decision belonged to his party, and “if that was going to happen, it would’ve already happened.” Hadad, for her part, urged voters to “carefully choose what kind of people they will trust … to create communities for all.”
We’re back with our weekly cities-related trivia challenge! John Beaven of Madrid was the quickest reader to identify Birkenhead as the home of the eponymous space that was the world’s first fully public urban park.
As far back as the Renaissance, spaces like Hyde Park have served as oases near urban centers, but public access to these grounds was severely limited. That changed in 1847, when Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council inaugurated the world’s first municipally funded civic park built for everyone on 226 acres of former grazing land. Designed by Joseph Paxton, Birkenhead served as an inspiration for Frederick Law Olmsted — who went on to design New York’s Central Park — and other landscape architects.
This week’s challenge: Nominative Determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate toward areas of work that fit their names. A former chief justice of England and Wales, for example, was named Igor Judge; across the Atlantic, Amy Freeze is a respected meteorologist. This phenomenon is also present in local politics; the reader who identifies the largest European city to have been led by a mayor with a suitably fitting name gets a shout-out in next week’s newsletter.
— Climate migrants are expected to overwhelm megacities like Dhaka and Bogotá by 2050, Bloomberg’s CityLab reports.
— This meditative piece on how climate anxiety affects city dwellers in The Atlantic is well worth a read.
— Gentrification can be kept at bay as long as residents view their neighborhood as a “welcome, desirable space worked to cultivate its institutions and connect its people,” two scholars argue in The Conversation.
THANKS TO: Victor Goury-Laffont, Leyla Aksu, Paul Dallison, and my editors Kelsey Hayes and Stephan Faris, and producer Giulia Poloni.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this newsletter misstated the nature of the role of the high representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was created under the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement and represents the international community.
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POLITICO’s Global Policy Lab is a collaborative journalism project seeking solutions to challenges faced by modern societies in an age of rapid change. Over the coming months we will host a conversation on how to make cities more livable and sustainable.