What is the difference between a Polish woman and a Ukrainian woman in regional elections?
The upcoming local elections in Poland are an opportunity to lean on the issue of granting voting rights to foreigners. What fires the imagination most is the discussion of the possibility of voting by migrants from Ukraine, who make up the largest collective of foreigners in Poland.
Is this even possible? Yes, although granting the right to vote requires a change in the law, and lawyers are arguing whether only in the election code or also in the constitution.
Is the opportunity for foreigners to influence the shape of the local community in which they reside a revolution? No, in Poland foreigners already have the right to participate in local elections. In addition to Polish citizens, European Union residents who are not Polish citizens and citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have the active right to vote in elections to the municipal council, as well as in elections for mayor or president. Foreigners can be village leaders. Foreigners can participate in voting on civic budgets.
This has been the case for a long time, although few are aware of it. In other European countries, too, migrants have local voting rights, limited by various criteria (length of stay, its legal regulation and reciprocal relations with the country of which the migrant is a citizen).
The Ukrainian context will be key
More important than the existing state is to think about the target state. The political context in which the debate takes place is complex. In Poland, there are no laws defining the state’s attitude to migration, as there has been no binding policy document for many years.
The views of individual political actors are usually identified at high-profile media events related to migrants and migration (in very different aspects) and do not form a coherent narrative. After the idea of granting voting rights to foreigners appeared in the public sphere (in June 2022 in the pages of “Gazeta Wyborcza” the then RPO spoke about it, in February 2024 in the pages of “Rzeczpospolita” Pawel Rachowicz and Michal Kolanko wrote about it), strong criticism of the idea was expressed by the Confederation. The centrist parties speak out very cautiously, reluctant to reveal their view, while the left is most supportive.
Public sentiment is also dynamic. The granting of voting rights to foreigners today triggers a predominantly Ukrainian context, which is of course justified by the number of migrants from Ukraine and the ongoing war. Thus, any favorability toward the idea will depend on the mutual perceptions of Poles and Ukrainians. And these mutual perceptions, opinion polls show, tend to take on increasingly negative attitudes toward the neighbor. However, they are primarily emanations of processes taking place at the macro level (e.g., the problem of the presence of Ukrainian food on the Polish market) and meso level (e.g., the discussion of limiting the rights of migrants arriving after February 2022).
Bring the debate to the micro level
The debate about granting voting rights in local elections (without the county and provincial levels) should bring us down to the micro level, i.e. everyday life in the urban community. A community that is built by citizens of the city, who do not have to be citizens of the state, but who may want to exercise their “right to the city,” to participate in urban daily life, but also to shape and change it.
The community, deciding during local elections who will run the city on its behalf, is determined by its space, its members have a sense of belonging to it (a sense of “we” is generated), residents are also connected by various relationships and ties formed by daily practices.
These three aspects (spatial, identity and relational) speak to the essence of the local community. In this sense, citizens of a city are those who live there (in the issue we are discussing, it will probably be important how long this has to be), who have a sense of being a resident (which can be expressed in the sense of being a Dzierżonian, a Poznanian, a resident of Łódź) and who participate in social networks and form strong and weak social ties within them – so it does not matter much whether they are registered in the city or what nationality they are.
What characterizes “urban citizenship”
The concept of municipal citizenship is distinguished from state citizenship primarily by its informal nature and the less strictly defined and enforced rights and obligations associated with it. The sociological concept of urban citizenship is supported by the legal provisions already in force (which is especially important when it comes to formalizing social ideas) – because the Constitution of the Republic of Poland says that a local community is “The total population of the units of basic territorial division.”
The question of whether foreigners can have the passive and active right to vote for municipal councils, mayors and city mayors can therefore be transformed into a question of who should or could decide the fate of their small homeland. Is it only citizens of the country in question, or foreigners as well?
At the same time, one may ask if this is “their homeland” at all, because perhaps as a majority we want to think and believe that they are just visitors? Or perhaps we believe that foreigners are entitled to this right, but only to some – those more like us, striving to assimilate, perceived by us as safe, resident for some time? Each potential answer, whether showing openness or aversion to migrants’ participation in deciding urban daily life, hides a set of arguments justifying it.
In the context of municipal elections thinking about the local community, of which migrants (who do not have Polish citizenship) are a part, makes one think about what urban citizenship is or could be, who a city citizen is or could be, and what kind of “right to the city” he or she could enjoy, as well as the importance of the ethnic question in all these elements. So, what could be taken into account when starting to think about granting voting rights to non-EU foreigners (although the same issues can be raised for citizens from the EU, citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, who already have the right to vote)?
Participation
City citizenship includes. the opportunity to engage in urban daily life and take advantage of available urban “instrumentation” – access to public services, urban infrastructure, the job market or social security. What is at stake here, however, is not only the use of the city, but also an active influence on what happens in the city, linked to political participation and the scope of decision-making.
Some of the participatory tools are already available to migrants – voting in civic budgets, association activity of foreigners, their participation in demonstrations, protests, urban movements. They can build in some people a sense of influence over what happens in the city, giving rise among some of them to the belief that something depends on them. However, there are also participation tools that still remain inaccessible to a large part of the new residents of Polish cities – the opportunity to decide who will run the city and how local policies will be shaped.
However, involvement in the life of the city also means obligations to the city and its residents – paying taxes, taking care of common spaces, initiating and implementing projects that improve the quality of life in the city. In practice, urban residents participate with varying intensity, both in terms of rights and responsibilities. Therefore, returning to the question of granting local voting rights to foreigners, it is worth considering whether the involvement of a Polish citizen and a foreigner, such as for the renovation of a neighborhood playground, voting in the civic budget and participating in local elections, makes a difference? Similarly, one can ask about the reverse situation – when neither a citizen of the state nor a foreigner does it.
Grassroots community
Urban citizenship is also the daily, grassroots building of a local community through networking and developing relationships across national differences based on citizenship. Some of them are born in the situation of cohabitation in different places – co-habitation, cooperation; some of them result from activities for the immediate environment – taking care of the staircase, the yard. Here, too, the question can be asked about the differences between a Polish citizen and a foreigner. Finally, urban citizenship involves a sense of being a city resident, a subjective identification with the city and its residents. It’s a sense of “being at home,” a nascent connection to a new small homeland.
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The three identified dimensions of urban citizenship – participatory, relational and identity – are characterized by varying degrees of involvement, regardless of nationality and state citizenship. But nevertheless, among the host community, the activity of foreigners in shaping the city and urban life, especially in its “hardline edition” linked to participation in local elections, may evoke different emotions, cause difficulty in agreeing to such a measure of decision-making. Because of this, relationship and identity issues may seem less problematic or even unproblematic.
What, then, are the limitations of such an understanding of urban citizenship in the Polish context?
Knowing that some foreigners already have the right to participate in local elections, the question is whether the “right to the city” should be limited depending on which country migrants come to Poland from, how far – as a consequence – they differ from us (the majority) culturally, religiously, and some might say civilizationally? To what extent do these differences translate into our sense of security and the social order established by the majority and the anticipated violation of local (one would even like to say domestic) mirrors? And perhaps a more important question should be asked: doesn’t the “right to the city” depend more and more on the numerical share of migrants in urban and rural communities?
In answering this question, it seems important to refer to the long-standing experience of living in a homogeneous national community and local communities with “their own,” with few “tame others/aliens” – Polish citizens of non-Polish nationality or ethnicity (people identifying themselves as Germans, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Czechs, Roma, Armenians, etc.), whose rights were regulated only in 2005 (in the Law on National and Ethnic Minorities and Regional Language). These experiences are reflected not so much (perhaps not primarily?) in the way migrants, who are arriving in increasing numbers and taking root in the local communities they join, are perceived, but in the way they see their role as active residents with influence over city life, making decisions, including determining the extent of the “right to the city” for foreigners.
