What’s in a People? Social Facts, Individual Choice, and the European Union 41 in defining the ‘people’ convincingly, should they have restrictions in mind. This goes far beyond municipal or EP elections, which the EU Treaties open up for all EU citizens. It goes to the very core of the relationship between the people and the state. The state sanction is not required for any EU citizen to belong de facto, and in many respects also de jure, to the people of a member state. Alongside with a handful of exceptions from the main non-­discrimination rule, which are irrelevant for the absolute majority of EU citizens, national elections fall outside the realm of EU law. This is impossible to justify in the light of the developments described above. Once the member states, acting via the EU, have effectively transformed themselves from the shapers of society into the observers of how EU citizens use their rights, the exclusion of EU citizens without a local nationality from national elections becomes unjustifiable, as this boils down to ignoring social facts beyond the states’ control. This is exactly why Bauböck’s position is unfounded. It adopts a national model in ignoring social facts as a starting point. Since member state nationalities are in the absolute majority of cases legally inconsequential for EU citizens travelling around the EU, connecting democratic ­participation with naturalisation amounts to artificially inflating the importance of an ‘abolished’ status. While it is always easier to argue for not changing anything, in this particular case change is definitely required. Although practically speaking the impact of the initiative, should it be successful, is likely to be very limited, symbolically its significance will be huge. Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.