What happened to Nancy Facer will probably remain a secret. The German interior minister, who is currently running as the SPD’s top candidate for prime minister of Hesse, wants to significantly expand local voting rights. Refugees who have lived in Germany for at least six months should be allowed to vote.
The election program literally reads: “We want to work hard at the federal level and in the Bundesrat to ensure that everyone who has lived in Hessian municipalities for more than six months is given the right to vote in local elections. “
In some small communities, asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Syria will be allowed to determine who becomes mayor of that place. There have long been villages that have had to accept more adult immigrants than residents eligible to vote.
However, the SPD added a small restriction. A spokesperson told BILD: “These are people who have permanent residence permits.” In practice, it usually takes more than six months for refugees to obtain a residence permit.
And yet: until now, only local EU citizens have been allowed to vote locally. If Feser’s plans had gone according to plan, all non-EU citizens in Germany, like millions of Turks, would have had the right to vote in local elections.
CDU interior expert Stefan Heck, 41, calls the interior minister’s proposal a “dangerous wrong turn.” Manfred Pentz (43), General Secretary of the Hessian CDU: “The right to vote is not football for election campaigns, but one of our highest democratic values – and must be reserved for members of our state. Loosening this right to vote as desired and linking it only to residence rather than citizenship is contrary to our democratic principles and we as the CDU categorically reject this.
