EU Citizens Should Have Voting Rights in National Elections, But in Which Country? Rainer Bauböck I will be happy if Philippe Cayla’s and Catriona Seth’s proposal for a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) on national voting rights for EU citizens is successful. But I will not sign it myself. I agree that there is a serious democratic deficit in the current regulation of voting rights. It is contrary to the spirit of EU law if EU citizens who take up residence in another member state lose fundamental rights as a consequence of exercising their right of free movement. And it seems particularly perverse that they retain their rights to vote in local and European Parliament elections but can lose the more significant franchise in national elections. The question is: which country should be responsible for letting them vote and under which conditions? Philippe Cayla and Catriona Seth argue that this should be the country of residence, where citizens pay their taxes and are most comprehensively affected by political decisions. I agree that all long-term residents, and not only EU migrants, should have access to the franchise for these reasons. However, it is not unfair to ask immigrants to apply for their host country’s citizenship if they want to fully participate. This will not only provide them with all democratic rights but will also send a signal to the sedentary native citizens that these immigrants have a long-term commitment to their country of residence. After all, national parliaments make laws that affect not only current residents but also future generations. Of course, neither native citizens nor immigrants can be forced to stay for the rest of their lives. But citizenship is generally a life-long status that is neither automatically acquired nor automatically lost when moving to another country. And therefore, acquiring it through a public declaration of consent sends a signal of long-term commitment that residence alone cannot convey. Let me emphasize that this is not an argument for citizenship tests that punish the less educated immigrants, nor an argument that immigrants must show exclusive loyalties towards their host country by abandoning their citizenship of origin. All immigrants should be offered opportunities to naturalise after they have become long-term residents – which in the EU means after five years – and dual citizenship should be broadly tolerated. Under © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_3 23