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I would support the idea of a citizens’ initiative proposing the extension to EU citizens of the right to vote in national elections in the member state of residence. At the same time, I do not share the view that we should ‘start with the Europeans first’. EU policy makers should encourage member states to facilitate access to national citizenship for third country nationals who are long term residents in a member state.

As an activist NGO, we fully support this ECI, but not without emphasizing that, in the long-term, the European people must become a post-national and inclusive concept, overcoming the exclusion of third-country nationals.

The EU legal norms should reflect social practices and EU citizens’ lived encounters. National electoral participation should therefore be made available to all those EU citizens who are emmeshed in the member states of their residence and have been sharing their burdens without complaint for so many years.

History demonstrates that the extension of participation rights is a process. The energy and efforts that the ECI needs to achieve its goals could probably be better focused helping to ensure implementation of the stage where we are now. This means trying to reach a significant level of participation of second country nationals at local or EP elections in the host countries, or aiming at participation in regional elections as the next step in the process of strengthening European citizenship.

This contribution raises questions of how to enfranchise EU citizens who are highly mobile between Member States and those who reside in third countries. It also points out that voting rights have a low mobilising value and few third country nationals participate in local elections where they are enfranchised. I propose a more permissive legal framework within which EU citizens should be allowed to choose, depending on their circumstances, whether to vote in their country of residence or of nationality.

The right to vote is so fundamental to democracy that any arguments reflecting the difficulties of putting it into effect pale into insignificance. An incremental approach to European citizenship can work, for example in the area of social rights and entitlements, but it is more questionable in the area of political rights.

When it comes to the problem of disenfranchisement of mobile EU citizens, naturalisation solves too little too late. Because of the specificity of the situation of EU citizens, alternative ways of political inclusion are preferable to naturalisation. I propose an argument for portable political rights for mobile EU citizens.

The different cases made in this debate for or against our ECI have only strengthened our resolve. There is broad consensus that the current situation is untenable. Let us do all we can to right democratic wrongs and endow European citizens with voting rights wherever they choose to reside in the EU.

Freedom of movement is under attack politically, legally, and conceptually. There is more than one reason to defend it. I argue that EU citizenship be primarily about free movement as it (a) emancipates the individual from the nation state; (b) it serves to recalibrate questions of justice and democracy in a more appropriate manner; and (c) it lacks the ties to a homogenous political ‘community of fate’ that perpetuate significant exclusionary practices.

If we want the Court of Justice of the European Union to employ citizens’ rights to foster a supranational vision of justice, we have to move beyond a minimalist reading of free movement as correcting unwelcome outcomes at the national level. What would be required instead is a vision of social justice for the Union as a whole, not only for those moving to other Member States.