Freedom of movement is a unique achievement. But the right to move without the right to vote is a feeble one
to vote is annoying, but it beats a 10-hour round trip on a bus. Aleksandra Sojka, a Polish academic who works in Spain, had to post her ballot in the first round of the Polish presidential election on June 28th. This is an improvement on 2007, before postal voting was introduced, when Ms Sojka made the 500-mile round trip from Granada to the Polish embassy in Madrid to cast a vote. Voting on matters closer to home is not an option.
Some end up disenfranchised altogether. After 18 months away, Irish citizens are kicked off the voting register. For others, voting is simply made difficult, sometimes cynically. In Hungary, citizens abroad with a residential address in Hungary must vote at a consulate, while those without one can vote by post. In practice, this means young Hungarians working abroad temporarily have to make an often long and inconvenient trip to a consulate.
Turnout, unsurprisingly, is much lower among citizens who live abroad. Given that those who emigrate tend to be young, this can do funny things to a nation’s politics. Rather than stay and push for a bad government to be swapped for a good one, fed-up young liberals can head to the door. To stay and fight is hard if you can flee and thrive instead. In this way, freedom of movement acts as a pressure valve for autocratic regimes, argues R.
When expats do vote, they can make all the difference. Ms Sojka is one of more than 500,000 expat Poles who are registered to vote in the next round of the Polish presidential contest, on July 12th. The run-off between Andrzej Duda, the incumbent from the nationalist Law and Justice party, and Rafał Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, is tight. Polls show both on 50%. Over 100,000 extra expat voters registered the day before the deadline.
. It gives those who use it a primarily economic relationship with their new country, rather than a civic one. European workers are reduced to a silent cog in a machine, pumping cash into a system over which they have no control. It pushes against what manyis sometimes accused by its more fervent critics of wanting to erase national differences. In this case, it does the opposite, forcing those who move to cling onto their national politics.Efforts to fix these flaws have fallen flat.
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