Category: Politics

The scorer of the opening American goal against Bosnia, Folarin Balogun, is eligible to play for the United States only because airline employees in New York kept his pregnant mother from returning to London until her son was born.

As our Riya Misra wrote recently, it makes Balogun not only the leader of a reinvigorated U.S. attack but a poster child for a cause validated yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court: that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution guarantees citizenship to anyone born within its borders.

Read Riya’s story about Balogun and the debate over birthright citizenship here.

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Spotted at World Cup matches so far: King Felipe VI from Spain, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima from the Netherlands, and Norway’s Princess Ingrid Alexandra and Prince Sverre Magnus. The European royals have been out in force supporting their national teams.

Hardly spotted yet: Europe’s elected leaders.

European heads of government only tend to make appearances at matches in person during later stages of the tournament. For example, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, attended the 2018 final in Moscow and traveled to Qatar in 2022 for the semifinals and finals.

This is perhaps because a monarch attending the national team’s match is viewed as apolitical, whereas a prime minister making the same trip can invite criticism over priorities and use of public funds.

Indeed, this year, Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney had to reject opposition claims that his trip to Massachusetts to watch his country play Haiti was a taxpayer-funded “World Cup jolly.” Portuguese President António José Seguro also attended the Colombia vs. Portugal game in Miami last Saturday evening.

As the tournament heads toward the quarterfinals and beyond, expect more European politicians, whose countries remain in contention, to start appearing in the stands. So no Friedrich Merz or Rob Jetten…

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No matter the result on Wednesday night, the roughly 60,000 Bosnian Americans who call St. Louis home — reportedly the largest population of Bosnians outside Bosnia and Herzegovina — will have something to celebrate. Many, however, are unapologetically cheering for their homeland when it takes on the country they now call home.

“They are like dressing up in the jerseys, singing the anthem,” said Ibro Tucakovic, a Bosnian immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in 1998 and became the first Bosnian immigrant to seek elected office in Missouri. “Looking at my daughter, when we won against Qatar, she was crying. And so basically they, they can see the happiness in their parents’ eyes, because it means so much to us. So the kids are basically just going nuts over it.”

Mirhad Hasanovic, a Bosnian immigrant who came to the U.S. in July 2001 and is now a legislative staffer running to represent parts of St. Louis’s South County in the Missouri statehouse, said it was “unfortunate” that his two favorite countries are playing against one another so early on in the tournament.

“For Bosnians, this is huge,” he said. “We’re a very small country, so just to be able to be at the World Cup and compete is an achievement in itself. “Kids grow up at the age of three or four, they start playing, they start watching, they start going to all the leagues, so the excitement level is out the roof.”

For refugees whose memories of Bosnia revolve around war and genocide, its first-ever appearance in the knockout rounds has become a way to reconnect with the country they fled.

“It’s not very often that you get, like, really great news from Bosnia,” said Adna Karamehic-Oates, director of the Center for Bosnian Studies at Saint Louis University. “People want good stories that come out of Bosnia, and that’s why they’re so happy.”

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BELGRADE, Serbia — The nearly four-year Bosnian war in the 1990s set off a massive wave of displacement, with a third of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s pre-war population permanently leaving the country as refugees.

Team captain Edin Džeko, a 40-year-old striker who left his native Sarajevo soon after the war, has recalled playing soccer in the lulls between the daily barrage of sniper fire that defined the siege of the Bosnian capital and says he could never have imagined becoming a world-class player after watching the football pitches in his neighborhood reduced to “fields of scorched earth.”

Bosnia’s squad reflects that postwar diaspora. Left back Sead Kolašinac was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1993 to a family that left after Bosnia descended into war. Right back Amar Dedić was born in Austria after his parents left northern Bosnia during the war, and midfielder Benjamin Tahirović in Sweden to refugees from besieged Sarajevo.

And then there is the so-called Milwaukee Messi: young forward Esmir Bajraktarević, who was born in a Wisconsin to parents born in the eastern town that gave its name to the Srebrenica genocide.

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BRUSSELS — The Matongé area of Brussels was filled with drums and flags on Wednesday evening as every bar and barber shop showed the DR Congo vs. England game — the biggest Congolese match since 1974, when it won the African Cup of Nations and competed in the World Cup under the name Zaire.

Belgium’s relationship with DR Congo is rooted in its colonial rule, a legacy that continues to shape political, cultural and diplomatic ties today. Up to 50,000 members of the Congolese diaspora live in Brussels, with the vibrant Matongé as the epicenter.

English fans in Matongé were few and far between — and mainly silent — throughout most of the match as their team trailed for a long period before turning the game around.

Despite Congo’s eventual narrow defeat, supporters were stoked by the team’s performance. “At the end of the day Congo was better than England because they overperformed and England underperformed,” said Darshan Pham, whose family hails from DR Congo. “That’s the beauty of the games, it’s a victory for them anyway because they made it so far.”

Sydney Jadot, who worked for five years in DR Congo where his family is from, also admired the team’s fight: “What can I say? I think Congo fought well — they put all their hearts [into it] and England is more thorough.”

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When two teams take to the World Cup pitch, their national histories and politics take the field with them. Seldom is that weight as present as in Wednesday’s knockout stage game between the U.S. and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The U.S. played a decisive role in ending Bosnia’s nearly four-year war in the 1990s, a conflict that claimed more than 100,000 lives and produced the single worst crime on European soil since World War II — the Srebrenica Genocide, in which more than 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys, were summarily executed in early July 1995.

“The United States is an indispensable ally,” said Reuf Bajrović, the vice president of the US-Europe Alliance, a nonprofit group that works on mobilizing Americans around key European issues.

Bajrović, as many in Bosnia would, highlights that the existence of an “independent, free and sovereign Bosnia” is the direct result of U.S. involvement in ending the war and brokering a peace deal, widely known as the Dayton Peace Accords — signed in Dayton, Ohio.

Thirty years later, the country faces internal disputes and struggles with a political system that is deeply vulnerable to nationalist manipulation. But reaching this stage and competing against their erstwhile liberator has unleashed a rare moment of collective elation across the Balkan nation.

“A nation which was supposed to be erased from history is competing with the most powerful and influential nation in the world,” Bajrović continued. “The euphoria is absolute,” he continued.

Even the country’s most famous footballing son, former AC Milan star Zlatan Ibrahimović, said he felt “goosebumps” watching Bosnia’s fairytale run to the round of 32. Ibrahimović, who was born in Sweden but embraces his father’s Bosnian heritage, had earlier trolled his fellow Fox Sports co-anchors by playing pop-folk songs by Bosnian singer Lepa Brena as an homage to his roots.

Yet back home, some worry that America’s more recent role in Bosnia’s brittle political order has been anything but benign.

“Until Trump entered the scene, there was bipartisan support for Bosnia … after all, Americans are the founding fathers of the peace deal that became the Bosnian constitution,” said prominent author and political analyst Dragan Bursać, who is based in Banjaluka.

Two Trump administrations have steadily hollowed out that commitment, and some of the most destabilizing figures in Bosnia right now are Trump allies such as Rudy Giuliani and Rod Blagojevich.

Blagojevich, the disgraced former governor of Illinois, has promoted far-right talking points about a “persecuted Serbian Christian minority” — his own background is ethnically Serbian — by a “radicalized Muslim leadership” in the country.

Giuliani promotes the same kind of “Christian victimization” narratives as Blagojevich, and also often draws comparisons between Trump and Milorad Dodik, an ultranationalist pro-Putin Bosnian Serb leader, saying they’re victims of the same “lawfare” movement led by liberal or woke judges. Dodik was stripped of the presidency last year after directly violating the Bosnian constitution and encouraging separatist activity.

The “Christian victimization” rhetoric employs the same divisive logic that produced the war itself. In the 1990s, political and military leaders turned a country praised for its diversity against itself, pitting its nominally Orthodox Christian, Catholic and Muslim populations against one another as neighboring Serbia and Croatia backed forces across the border.

Giuliani’s and Blagojevich’s narratives have particular populist purchase with figures like Dodik, who was, until recently, on a U.S. sanctions and travel ban list. Giuliani is thought to have played a key role in getting the sanctions against Dodik lifted last year.

“Dodik is one of those European leaders who wholeheartedly supports Trump’s beliefs and sees himself as a mini-Trump in Bosnia,” Bursać continued.

Bosnia’s political system rests on intense ethnic power-sharing, which has now turned into one of its key weaknesses. In Banjaluka, the administrative seat of the Serb-majority entity of Republika Srpska, pro-Trump chants now ring out at rallies, including during a visit by Donald Trump Jr. in April.

“Now we’re facing a situation where many people would prefer the current U.S. administration ignore Bosnia as much as possible and not get involved, since they fear that there would be no positive effect,” Bursać explained.

Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, is a registered foreign agent for Dodik. His brother Joseph, along with Jesse Binnall — a former Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election — runs a company chasing a $1.8 billion investment in Bosnian airports, gas power plants and a pipeline.

The country that saved Bosnia is now, according to some accounts, actively engaged in undermining it.

“The U.S. policy in the 2020s is not something that Bosnians experienced in the past, and the U.S. never previously openly sided with nationalist Serb and Croats at the expense of the Bosniak-majority of the country,” Bajrović said.

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BRUSSELS — Forty-four members of the European Parliament are urging FIFA President Gianni Infantino to reverse his decision to allow Russian athletes to play at this year’s inaugural U-15 World Cup in Azerbaijan.

They argue that Russia should not be readmitted to FIFA competitions until it enters peace negotiations with Ukraine, ceases fire and agrees to return children kidnapped from Ukrainian territories.

In a letter obtained by POLITICO, the lawmakers criticize global football body FIFA for ignoring what they described as “around 20,000 Ukrainian children … forcibly kidnapped and separated from their families by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s regime.”

“We urge FIFA to stand on the side of peace and not appease the aggressor – Russia,” the letter reads.

After Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, FIFA banned Russia from participating in all of its football competitions. FIFA lifted the blanket ban for youth competitions in 2023, but Russian teams have not played in its U-17 World Cups since.

FIFA announced last week its first U-15 World Cup, in which boys and girls will compete this October in Azerbaijan. At the time, the organization announced that the competition would be open to “all FIFA member associations,” opening the door to Russia’s participation.

Infantino said in February that FIFA should lift its ban on Russia, saying that bans “create more hatred.”

The European lawmakers argue that allowing Russia to participate could lead other member countries to boycott the competition, a stance they call “very understandable.” They argue that this would “distort FIFA sporting events, where the principle that the best team wins will no longer prevail.” Ukraine’s football federation has previously said it would not participate in competitions with Russia.

In March of 2022, Russia appealed the FIFA ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The body dismissed Russia’s claim. Russia’s gradual return to other sports has triggered outrage in Ukraine and been denounced by the EU.

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When Bosnian refugees started arriving in Utica, New York, in the mid-1990s, it was a down-on-its-heels Rust Belt city that had seen its population crater by roughly a third from a mid-century peak of just over 100,000 residents.

“I thought I came to another war zone when I came here,” said Hanka Grabovica, who arrived in the Mohawk Valley city in 2001 when she was 16 years old, citing the prevalence of boarded-up buildings and garbage on the streets. “Utica was pretty bad back then.”

Grabovica, now president of the Bosnian American Community Association, was part of a wave of refugees who settled in Utica after fleeing the brutal war in their native country — and its messy aftermath — that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Exact figures are tough to pin down, but it’s believed that about 6,000 Bosnians now live in Utica — or nearly 10 percent of the total population.

The epicenter of Bosnian American culture will never be as conflicted as tonight, when Bosnia and Herzegovina faces the United States in a Round of 32 match. It’s just the second time that Bosnia has qualified for the tournament since it became an independent country in 1992.

This will be the first time Bosnia has advanced to the knockout rounds, heightening the delirium among Bosnians from Sarajevo to St. Louis (the largest enclave of Bosnians in the U.S.) to Utica ahead of tonight’s kickoff.

“Seeing this national team progress to the World Cup is definitely something amazing,” said Sandro Sehic, secretary of the Bosnian American Community Association of Utica, noting that many ethnic Serbians and Croatians who live in the country still refuse to play for the national team owing to lingering tensions from the war. “Bosnia is still struggling politically, socially. There are still so many problems that are still affecting the country.”

The arrival of the Bosnians in Utica has been followed by waves of other immigrants — most notably a large influx of Karen refugees originally from Burma — that have helped revitalize the city. East Utica, once primarily an enclave of Italian Americans, has become a center of the Bosnian community. Last November, a traditional Bosnian fountain called a sebilj — modeled after a famous fountain in Sarajevo — was unveiled in the neighborhood as a symbol of their importance to the city.

“We were very, very fortunate that the Bosnians have claimed this as their home because they reconstructed some parts of our city,” said Rob Palmieri, who served as Utica’s mayor from 2012 to 2024. “It has been a wonderful blend bringing the city back to vibrancy.”

The current mayor, Mike Galime, points to Two Brothers Cafe & Pizzeria as emblematic of the entrepreneurial spirit Bosnians have brought to the city. The restaurant serves up pizza slices (of course), but also Bosnian specialties like burek (meat pies) and cevapi (grilled sausages).

“It’s like a perfect, perfect example of that melting pot,” Galime said.

There will be many viewers with divided allegiances at tonight’s watch party sponsored by the Bosnian American Community Association at the Utica Club Lounge.

“We are proud Americans, but we are also proud Bosnians and tonight we celebrate both,” said Grabovica, the assocation’s president. “The U.S. is our home, but Bosnia is our heritage — and soccer brings us together.”

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