EU Citizens Should Have Voting Rights in National Elections, But in Which… 25 the same logic not also apply to a withdrawal of national voting rights in case of exercise of free movement rights? The promoters of the ‘Let me vote’ ECI will object that long-term residents abroad are more strongly affected by the laws of their host country than by those of the state whose citizens they are. But voting rights cannot be determined by a principle of affected interests alone, or else the whole world should have a right to vote in the next US presidential election. We need instead a criterion of genuine ties between voters and the political community where they cast their vote. Migrants often maintain genuine ties to their country of origin while developing at the same time such ties to their country of residence. If they want to fully participate in the latter, they should be able to do so by applying for naturalisation. And if they no longer care about participating in the former, they should be free not to vote in homeland elections or also to renounce their citizenship. Although there is a strong global trend to grant voting rights to expatriates, I do not think that all citizens who live abroad should have a right to vote. If we care about genuine ties, then those who have inherited their citizenship by birth abroad should not have a say in decisions about the future of a country where they have never lived and are unlikely to ever live. And the current Hungarian government’s policy to offer first dual citizenship and now also voting rights in national elections to ethnic Hungarian citizens of neighbouring countries is a clear example how external voting rights can be abused by nationalists in power.2 However, second and third generations of immigrant origin as well as native ethnic minorities with neighbouring kin states can be excluded by limiting the external franchise to first generation migrants. The case for external voting rights is particularly strong in the EU for three reasons. First, because it can be linked to the core of EU citizenship, which is the right of free movement; second, because it respects the principle that EU citizenship is derived from member state nationality rather than from residence; and third because it secures that free movers will not lose their indirect representation in EU legislation through the vote of their national government in the Council. 2 See the EUDO CITIZENSHIP forum debate: Bauböck, R. (ed.) (2010), ‘Dual citizenship for transborder minorities? How to respond to the HungarianSlovak tit-for-tat’, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUDO Citizenship Observatory Working Paper 2010/75, Florence: European University Institute, available at http://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/14625