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Leftist Party Wants Voting Rights For All Foreigners Who've Lived In Germany For 5 Years

Via Remix News,

Germany’s Left Party is pushing for a major overhaul of the German electoral system by proposing that foreign residents without a German passport be granted voting rights after five years of legal residency.

To achieve this, the Left faction in the Bundestag has submitted a formal application demanding that anyone residing legally in the country for at least five years be permitted to vote in federal elections, irrespective of their nationality.

The move would serve as a major electoral boost for left-wing parties, with foreigners overwhelmingly voting for these parties when given the opportunity. Data from the Federal Statistical Office cited in the motion reveals that over 14 million people living in Germany in 2025 lacked German citizenship, a figure that includes roughly 5 million EU citizens. This foreign population has resided in the country for an average of 15 years. In other words, this pool of potential voters for the left is massive.

The initiative also urges the federal government to collaborate with individual states to implement identical changes for state and municipal elections, according to German news outlet Tagesspiegel. The party argues that the current system suffers from an expanding democratic deficit due to the fact that non-German nationals are systematically blocked from participating in federal, state, and most local elections.

The Left finds this exclusion “intolerable, “ given the democratic principles outlined in the Basic Law, arguing that it ignores the reality of Germany as an “immigration society.”

Addressing potential legal hurdles, the Left Party points out that while the Federal Constitutional Court blocked voting rights for foreigners back in 1990, this stance deserves reconsideration due to shifting global dynamics and the fact that EU citizens have since gained local voting rights. They also highlight a linguistic nuance in the constitution, observing that the Basic Law uses the word “people“ in critical sections rather than explicitly restricting terms to “the German people.”

The proposal, which is officially titled “Introduce voting rights for foreigners,” was initiated by a group of lawmakers including Ferat Koçak and the wider Left Party parliamentary group, with signatures from group leaders Heidi Reichinnek and Sören Pellmann.

This motion continues a long-standing political campaign by the Left Party, which references its own 2014 draft legislation as part of a multi-year effort to expand suffrage.

Recently, Elif Eralp, the party’s top candidate in Berlin, echoed these demands.

This has not even been the most radical demand from the Left. In 2023, then German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser proposed to give asylum seekers the right to vote in local state elections after just six months in Germany. The program, if implemented, would have translated into millions of new voters overnight.

At the time, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was immediately critical of what it described as an attempt to stack the vote with migrants, releasing a statement that read:

“Interior Minister Faeser (SPD), as the top candidate in the Hessian state elections, is campaigning for local voting rights for all people who have lived in Germany for ‘longer than six months.’ This means that supposed ‘refugees’ from Afghanistan, Syria or Turkey would also be allowed to vote – even without German citizenship.

“The German passport is thus turned into a piece of junk. But above all: Faeser and the SPD want to attract people who have no connection to Germany at all as new groups of voters. This is not surprising, because the locals who are ridiculed as ‘non-migrants’ are running away from (Chanceller Olaf) Scholz’s SPD.”

Under current constitutional rules, federal voting rights are restricted to German citizens aged 18 and older, while Berlin state elections require voters to be at least 16. The only current exception exists at the municipal level, where EU citizens can vote for district parliaments.

In response to such demands, the Federal Ministry of the Interior website states that “Migrants living in the Federal Republic of Germany for many years have the opportunity to become naturalized citizens under German citizenship law. In doing so, they also acquire the right to vote.”

However, the Left faction argues this pathway is insufficient and the requirements for citizenship are too burdensome.

The right has long contended that the left is using mass immigration as a tool to solidify political power. Foreigners are notoriously prone to voting for left-wing parties, with the logic being that more left-wing policies means more immigration for their fellow countrymen and more social welfare benefits for them and their families.

Many of these foreign groups often tend to vote quite conservatively in their own nations while shifting to the left in Western nations, such as the case of the Turkish community in Germany, which has approximately 1.5 million individuals with dual citizenship between Turkey and Germany. Half of these Turks vote for strongman Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkish elections and then shift their vote to the left in Germany.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 02:00

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NATO Warns Russia's Hybrid War Is Targeting Europe's Energy Grid

Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

• European officials fear Russia’s “grey war” is entering a more dangerous phase, with gas pipelines, electricity interconnectors, offshore networks, and subsea infrastructure increasingly vulnerable to sabotage and cyberattacks.

• Security sources say Moscow is escalating pressure because the Ukraine war is becoming harder to sustain militarily and economically.

• Recent incidents involving Russian-linked vessels and surveillance operations in the Baltic and North Seas have heightened concerns that Europe’s energy grid is becoming a frontline target in the broader confrontation with Russia.

While many may be focusing on the transfer of nuclear weapons from Russia to Belarus on NATO’s northeastern Baltic States border, the bloc's security apparatus is at least as concerned about imminent attacks on the region's energy infrastructure, a senior source who works very closely with the European Union's (E.U.'s) energy security complex exclusively told OilPrice.com last week.

“Russia’s effectively been at war with the West since February 2007 when [Russian President Vladimir] Putin condemned NATO’s expansion to the East, which was followed by a huge cyber-attack against Estonia,” he said. “Then we had the beginning of the land pushback, with Russia’s war on Georgia in 2008, where we [the West] did nothing to dissuade him from further actions Westwards, then the first invasion of Ukraine and annexation on Crimea in 2014, where we did nothing much again [as analysed in full in my latest book on the new global oil market order], and then the second invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” he added. “We’re into the final phase now, in which we’re making a stand, and Russia’s testing how resolved we are,” he underlined.

So, what happens next in terms of Europe’s crucial energy infrastructure?

“We expect hybrid attacks of the sort we’ve seen in recent years, and more direct physical ones, which have also increased in recent months, primarily against gas infrastructure, electricity cables, offshore networks, and control systems,” said the source. “The full array of these measures has already been used by Russia in Ukraine, so they’re ready to roll out whenever Putin wants -- it’s just a question of how far he’s willing to push the boundaries before he thinks we’ll react with true deterrent force,” he added. As also highlighted by the E.U. Institute for Security Studies, there have been several incidents since Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in which undersea energy cables were severed by Russian-affiliated vessels. For example, in December 2024, Russian shadow fleet vessel Eagle S was apprehended by Finnish authorities after severing EstLink 2, a critical electricity interconnector linking Finland and Estonia. The ship had military-grade detection hardware in its hull, indicating a direct, premeditated, and malicious attack on European energy infrastructure. Similarly, a Russian vessel, the Scanlark, was detained by authorities after being caught launching surveillance drones and carrying spying equipment near the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Station in Finland.

“Subsea electricity interconnectors and gas pipelines in the Baltic and North Seas are also highly vulnerable to the same style of attacks, with the same capabilities also available for the targeting of power grids to trigger cascading regional blackouts across the highly interconnected European electricity grids,” the E.U. source told OilPrice.com last week. Indeed, an attempted dual nature energy-telecommunications hit was tried by Russia within the last couple of months, as revealed by the British Ministry of Defence on 9 April. Three Russian submarines were mapping and surveying vital gas pipelines in the North Sea, and undersea electricity interconnectors vital to trading power with mainland Europe. “This is all part of Russia’s ongoing grey war with the West, focused on Europe right now, which aims to critically undermine us without crossing the boundary that triggers Article 5 and outright war between NATO and Russia,” the source underlined.

The key reason why there has been a surge in the scale and scope of Russia’s grey war in recent weeks is that Putin thinks time is running out for his ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine, according to security sources in Washington and London exclusively spoken to by OilPrice.com last week and exclusively confirmed by a very high-level Moscow-based source in the current Russian Administration. Part of Putin’s belief comes from the burn rate of Russian soldiers on the frontline, with only 70% of those killed now able to be replaced by new recruits. “This is the big problem, because it means that the [recruitment] net will have to be widened to areas that could cause political problems,” said the Moscow source last week. In this context, much of the burden of the war to date has been borne by Russia’s ethnic minorities and those from poor regions, for whom the relatively high military salaries and death benefits are life-changing money for them and their families, whether they live or die. So far, the more affluent, better-connected, and more highly educated ‘middle class’ Russians from the major metropolitan hubs -- specifically Moscow and St Petersburg -- have been largely insulated from the war. But, with Putin’s choice now being either an end to the war on Ukrainian terms or extending recruitment to the previously protected class, this could change, although both possibilities have been prepared for.

On the one hand, Putin said on 9 May that the Ukraine war is ‘coming to an end’ -- the first time in over four years of fighting that he has used this specific phrasing. 

On the other hand, Russia rolled out a unified digital conscription registry last May, which sends draft notices electronically via state portals.

The likelihood of major protests erupting if this system is used across Russia’s major metropolitan hubs may have been foreshadowed by the Kremlin’s drive to isolate the country’s internet, allowing it to suppress the kind of widespread dissent that fuelled the Arab Spring uprisings.

There are three other factors in the ‘why now’ equation for Russia, according to the Washington, London, and E.U. sources, again confirmed by the very highly placed source in Moscow.

• The most immediate catalyst was the unblocking of the €90 billion E.U. package for Ukraine, following the removal from power of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who acted as Putin’s de facto blocking vote on E.U. legislation the Russian premier did not want. Two-thirds of this money is strictly earmarked for spending by Ukraine on hard defence assets rather than just keeping the government afloat. Even without this, Ukraine has dramatically expanded its capabilities of hitting key military and civilian infrastructure targets deep inside Russia for the first time, with repeated hits on key sites connected to its ability to monetise its oil and gas resources by exports. Last year, according to industry figures, Russian oil firms suffered RUB1 trillion roubles (US$12.9 billion) in combined losses across 120 recorded energy facility strikes. But since January alone this year, Russia has already lost over US$7 billion in oil revenue, driven by the prolonged downtime of facilities and steep export reductions from disrupted Baltic Sea shipping hubs like Ust-Luga and Primorsk. Worse still for Putin is that his long-running project to keep U.S. President Donald Trump on its side has backfired as, no longer under the shackles of U.S. arms supply deals, Ukraine is no able to keep hitting any target it wants inside Russia up to 1,200 miles, putting over 70% of the Russian population within Ukraine’s crosshairs. Putin knows that this is only going to get worse, as Ukraine continues to develop the range and accuracy of its own missiles and drones with the funding from the new €90bn package.

• The second reason for Russia stepping up its pressure on the West is that Europe is moving ahead with new sanctions designed to end all imports of Russian gas and oil and cut off Moscow’s access to the financing that supports them. Liquefied natural gas imports will end by the end of this year, natural gas by 30 September next year, and crude oil and petroleum products by the end of next year. To this end, its latest (20th) Sanctions Package, adopted on 23 April, was structured specifically to cut off Russia's financial loopholes and squeeze what remains of its energy revenue. It focuses on eliminating its Shadow Fleet of vessels still transporting Russian oil and gas covertly around the world, and on ending crypto escape routes that allow Russia to use digital assets to circumvent traditional Western banking blocks.

• And the final reason, again an unintended by-product of Putin’s misjudgement in attempting to use Trump for his maximum benefit to Russia, is that because of Europe’s uncertainty now over the U.S. commitment to NATO’s Article 5, it is rearming at pace, at scale, and in size. Even before this current round of military build-up, the chance of Russia defeating a united European military force -- without the U.S. -- was minimal, which is why Moscow has continued to fight a grey war under the boundary that would trigger outright conflict. But European NATO’s membership has expanded since the Ukraine invasion, and commitments to new spending and realised new expenditure have increased dramatically.

In the end, Europe’s energy grid is no longer just infrastructure — it is the front line.

And Russia’s grey war will keep pressing against it until Moscow is convinced.

European officials fear Russia’s “grey war” is entering a more dangerous phase, with gas pipelines, electricity interconnectors, offshore networks, and subsea infrastructure increasingly vulnerable to sabotage and cyberattacks. The West is finally prepared to push back in a way that convinces Putin that he must go no further.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/28/2026 - 23:25

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