Five Pragmatic Reasons for a Dialogue with and Between Member States on Free Movement and Voting Rights Kees Groenendijk My first article on political rights of non-citizens immigrants was written together with my late colleague Bert Swart in 1978 for a journal in Rome. Since then my ideas and publications on this issue were guided by three principles: (a) no taxation without representation, (b) the longer an immigrant is resident in a country, the harder it is to justify his exclusion from political rights only on the basis of his nationality, and (c) once voting rights have been granted to non-citizens for municipal elections there are no serious principled arguments against extension to parliamentary elections. The second principle qualifies the first principle. Tourists and seasonal workers pay VAT, but that does not necessarily qualify them for voting rights. They should, however, have at least some other political rights, such as the right to demonstrate or the right to strike. This being said, I do not support the campaign for extending voting rights of EU nationals to national elections in the member state of residence. Five pragmatic arguments in my view outweigh the three principles mentioned above. (1) I sincerely doubt whether being unable to vote in parliamentary elections in the ‘host’ member state in real life is a barrier to free movement. Of course, it may be construed as a legal obstacle to free movement. But did many Union citizens decide not to use their right to migrate to another member state or to return permanently to the member state of their nationality, only because they wanted to vote in parliamentary elections in that state? Of course, the unequal treatment has to be justified. And yes, there is the problem of who belongs to the demos or the people(s) of the member state(s). The German Bundesverfassungsgericht in 1989 gave the most restrictive definition of people: only nationals of the country. The Court of Justice in Eman & Sevinger stressed that the definitions of the concept ‘peoples’ vary considerably between member states1. I suggest that using the right to free 1 Judgment of 12.9.2006, C-300/04, point 44. © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_10 51