Ten million German residents barred from February election by citizenship rules

When Germans go to the polls on 23 February, roughly 59.2 million citizens will be eligible to choose the next Bundestag. At the same time, about ten million adults who live, work and pay taxes in the country will have no ballot paper. They are excluded not by age, residence or criminal record, but by nationality. Germany’s constitution states that “the people vote”, yet the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) counts 14% of the adult population as non-citizens, a democratic deficit that has persisted for decades and that recent reforms have only partly narrowed.

A citizenship model built on descent, not residence

Modern German nationality law rests on the principle of jus sanguinis, right of blood, meaning citizenship is inherited from German parents rather than acquired by birth on German soil. That framework dates to the 1913 Reich and Citizenship Law and survived the founding of the Federal Republic. For the “guest workers” recruited from Italy, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere from the late 1950s, and for their children, the result was generations of permanent residents without political voice. The 2000 reform introduced a limited jus soli element: children born in Germany to foreign parents could acquire citizenship at birth if one parent had lived in the country legally for eight years and held a permanent residence permit. Even then, the child had to choose between German and parental citizenship by age 23, a requirement that effectively forced many to renounce one identity.

The January 2024 reform, pushed through by the traffic-light coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, marked the most significant liberalisation since 2000. The standard residency requirement for naturalisation dropped from eight to five years, with a “special integration” fast track of three years for those with strong German language skills, voluntary work or professional achievement. Dual nationality, previously restricted mainly to EU and Swiss citizens, became generally permissible. The government framed the changes as a tool to attract skilled labour in an economy where the working-age population is shrinking by roughly 300,000 people a year.

Why the new law still leaves millions waiting

On paper, the five-year clock starts ticking the day a foreign national registers their address. In practice, the path to the ballot box is longer. Özgür Özvatan, chief executive of the political consultancy Transformakers and author of a forthcoming book on Germans with international backgrounds, calculates that even in the best case, five years’ residence plus administrative processing, document translation, language exams and the mandatory citizenship test, the wait stretches to four to seven years. “That is, of course, not good for the quality of a democracy,” he said. The fees alone, €255 for the application, plus costs for certified translations of birth and marriage certificates, language courses and the test, can exceed €1,000, a sum that weighs heaviest on low earners.

Phil Butland, a British-born activist who moved to Germany in the 1990s and was until recently a member of the Left party, experienced the income barrier directly. “For a long time, my permanent residence has been Germany, my life has been in Germany, everything I do is in Germany and it was a bit of an anomaly not to be able to take part in elections there,” he said. When he first considered naturalisation, he was unemployed and told he would not qualify because his earnings fell below the threshold. “They have relaxed the rules now,” he added, “but if you don’t have a job or you have a low-paying job the rules are still a lot harder than if you’ve got a well-paying job there. There is exclusion of poor people in most of these rules.”

The constitutional lock on voting rights

Could Germany simply extend the franchise to long-term residents without requiring citizenship? The Federal Constitutional Court answered that question in 1990. After the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein and the city-state of Hamburg granted municipal voting rights to non-citizens, the court ruled that Article 20 of the Basic Law, “all state authority emanates from the people”, refers specifically to the German people, meaning citizens. Changing that would require a two-thirds majority in both the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, a threshold no coalition has approached in thirty years. Tobias Spöri, a senior researcher at the d|part think tank, which specialises in political participation, put it bluntly: “In most cases it is easier to change access to citizenship rather than voting rights, because voting rights are part of the constitution. But nothing is likely to change after the next election.”

EU citizens resident in Germany enjoy a partial franchise derived from EU treaties: they may vote and stand in municipal elections and in elections to the European Parliament. That right, however, does not extend to state or federal elections. British nationals lost even those privileges after Brexit, unless they hold dual EU citizenship.

A parliament that does not look like the country

The exclusion shows up in the composition of legislatures. According to d|part’s research, about 11% of Bundestag members have an international background, defined as having migrated themselves or having at least one parent who did. In the sixteen state parliaments the share falls to roughly 7%, and in several eastern states it drops below 1%. Spöri argues that the prospect of voting rights, independent of citizenship, changes political behaviour: “What you can see in our research is that the possibility of access to voting rights empowers people, because then they feel really politically integrated and there’s also more political participation independent from elections.” Without that prospect, parties have less incentive to address the concerns of non-citizen residents, and the policy feedback loop narrows.

Rhetoric hardens while law liberalises

The 2024 citizenship reform passed against a backdrop of sharpening anti-immigration rhetoric across the political spectrum. Özvatan described a “very hard regression” at the rhetorical level even as the legal level liberalised. Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the frontrunner for chancellor in February’s election, has suggested that citizenship granted years ago could be revoked in cases of fraud or dual loyalty, a position that resonates with the party’s right flank and with the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which polls second nationally. The Social Democrats and Greens, junior partners in the outgoing coalition, have not countered with proposals to extend voting rights to non-citizens. Spöri said the rightward shift “means none of the mainstream political parties running for election in February are talking about a more inclusive electoral system, and are in fact moving in the opposite direction.”

Politics beyond the ballot box

Non-citizens are not entirely voiceless. German law permits anyone, regardless of nationality, to join political parties, campaign groups and trade unions, to organise demonstrations and to strike. Butland, who cut his political teeth in the anti-globalisation network ATTAC, values those channels. “I’m an old-fashioned believer in demonstrations, in strikes even, in putting pressure on politicians so that even if you can’t vote for them then at least you can make them aware of your presence and of your demands, and that’s something where there isn’t an exclusion based on nationality,” he said. Yet protest is a supplement, not a substitute, for the routine accountability that elections provide.

What the numbers mean for the next government

Germany’s demographic arithmetic is unforgiving. The Federal Employment Agency estimates a shortfall of seven million workers by 2035 unless net immigration averages 400,000 a year. The citizenship reform was explicitly designed to make Germany more competitive in the global race for talent. But the same reform leaves new arrivals politically mute for half a decade or more. If the next coalition, likely CDU-led, possibly with the SPD or Greens, does not address the gap, the country will continue to recruit workers who build the economy but cannot choose the legislators who set the rules for their pensions, their rents, their children’s schools and their own path to citizenship.