Jede Stimme 2011

Movement Profile

Jede Stimme 2011 is a project initiated by Citizens For Europe e. V. and Jede Stimme e. V. and organised in cooperation with many public and private partners and civil society actors. The project will hold weeklong symbolic regional elections in Berlin shortly before the actual election on 18 September 2011 in order to highlight political discrimination against non-German Berlin residents. Additionally, dozens of cultural and educational workshops and panel discussions will be held across Berlin to discuss political participation more generally. Today nearly 460,000 of Berlin’s long-term residents, or about 13 percent, do not hold a German passport and thus are excluded from voting in the city’s regional elections.

The project is simple, but requires careful coordination. With local partners throughout the city, we are going to place voting booths all around Berlin and ask non-nationals to cast their vote. To accomplish this, the initiators are working closely with migrant and cultural associations, nonprofit groups and interested volunteers both to select strategic voting locations in places with high migrant populations, as well as to advertise our symbolic elections and encourage them to vote. As almost none of our target group are native German speakers, we will try to reach them in their native tongue—with informational materials translated into over a dozen languages—and by using local immigrant leaders to explain the importance of voting rights. Part of our advertising campaign is to select 11 ‘typical Berliners’ from different cultural backgrounds to share, in their own language, why they should be allowed to vote.

The main purpose of the symbolic election is to reveal the size and engagement of Berlin’s immigrant community, in order to raise awareness among all Berliners of the discrimination they face due to their exclusion from the electoral process. We hope to trigger a debate on migrants’ voting rights at the local and regional level. We want Berlin’s political elite to refine their positions with regard to immigrants and ‘real’ Berliners. We will base the project’s success not only on voters’ participation and the number of partner associations, but primarily by our ability to initiate a discussion among the general public and in the media and political spheres. The ultimate aim is get the elected governing parties to include voting rights reform in post-election coalition negotiations.

Citizens For Europe e. V., which also publishes this journal, was founded in 2010 in Berlin by politically engaged Europeans in order to create a new and inclusive transnational European Union citizenship. Jede Stimme e. V., also founded in Berlin in 2010, is run by a group of politicians and civil actors and is headed by Robert Schaddach, a member of Berlin’s parliament.

Our vision of an inclusive EU without discrimination and exclusion
There are over 20 million third-country nationals living in the European Union today, as well as 12.5 million EU citizens living outside their country of origin. The current patchwork of local, regional, national and EU legislation means that many of these long-term residents do not enjoy voting rights where they live. An inclusive EU to us is one in which all legal residents, after a certain period of time, are granted full political participation rights.

The EU has expanded dramatically from its origins as an economic union. Today, EU bureaucrats are trying to create an EU-wide identity that incorporates the diversity of its millions of immigrants. Integration is a major topic throughout the Union. However, it is impossible to ask immigrants to integrate into European culture if they are not entrusted with the most primary right of a democracy: the right to vote. To rectify this, we hope to spark an EU-wide discussion on voting rights, starting in our home in Berlin.

The symbolic elections in September are only the first step. We hope to use their success to help organisations throughout Europe organise similar elections and inspire the grassroots to fight for political participation rights. Only with these can our vision of an inclusive EU be realised.