Luxembourg rules out full voting rights for foreigners
LUXEMBOURG: Luxembourg overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum on Sunday giving full voting rights to foreign nationals, who make up nearly half the population.
Almost 78 per cent of voters in the tiny European country said “No” to allowing foreigners the vote, according to results from 91 polling stations.
Had the vote been carried, the tiny landlocked country of over half a million people would have been the first in the European Union to grant foreign-born residents the right to vote in all the country’s elections.
Prime Minister Xavier Bettel had billed the referendum as a chance to boost the democratic credentials of the wealthy duchy, which is nestled between Belgium, France and Germany.
A “Yes” vote would be “a yes to more democracy, a yes for the youth, a yes for diversity,” Bettel told AFP during campaigning Saturday in the capital, also called Luxembourg.
“There is no other European country where only 40 per cent of the population elects its representatives,” Bettel told journalists ahead of the referendum, in which 244,382 people were eligible to vote.
About 46 per cent of the total population of 565,000 people are foreigners.