What Is Wrong with Selling Citizenship? It Corrupts Democracy! 39 move to these island states in order to vote. Yet this seems a fortuitous coincidence rather than a policy design. The corruptive political influence of linking citizenship to investment can be nicely illustrated by the story of Frank Stronach, a billionaire of Austrian origins who made his fortune in Canada. Under Austrian law, Stronach lost his Austrian citizenship upon becoming a Canadian citizen. When he established European headquarters of his company in Austria, he was granted citizenship under a special provision that requires neither residence nor renunciation of another nationality and that has also been used to naturalise Russian oligarchs alongside famous artists and sportsmen on grounds of “extra-ordinary achievements in the interest of the republic”. Once he had retrieved his Austrian citizenship, Stronach started buying political influence by recruiting former politicians for his company. In 2012, Stronach bought himself also a political party that he called ‘Team Stronach’ and ran an expensive election campaign. He made a bit of a fool of himself in TV debates and got fewer votes than expected, but there is now a party in the Austrian Parliament established by and named after an investor-citizen. Maybe Stronach should not have lost Austrian citizenship in the first place. But the way in which he was able to reacquire it through his investment opened the doors widely to his subsequent corruptive influence on Austrian politics. Of course, citizenship-from-the-inside is not only about voting and being elected. I am not so sure that it requires loving your country, as Dzankic suggests. But it certainly means being treated as an equal member and treating others as equal members of a political community. Magni Berton also looks at citizenship from the inside but does not emphasize sufficiently equality among citizens. He is right that the state invests into citizens and citizens invest into each other. But citizenship status and rights must not be proportional to the investments citizens make, or even conditional on such investments. Voting rights provide again the test. Throughout much of the 19th century, the franchise was still a class privilege. ‘No taxation without representation’ also meant ‘no representation without taxation.’ Only those who contributed to the state coffers had a right to be represented in the making of laws. This is no longer our vision of democracy. True, democratic societies have hardly become more egalitarian since then and, as Stronach’s example demonstrates, wealth can rather shamelessly buy influence in politics. Turning the status of citizenship itself into a marketable commodity would mean more than this. It would tear down a wall of protection that keeps