The Centre for Studies and Intercultural and Social Training, or CEFIS, has launched a new series of classes on voting in Luxembourg as a foreign resident ahead of the super election year 2023.
“Anyone can become a multiplier,” CEFIS vice-director Frédéric Mertz says. “Multipliers” can be private individuals as well as members of associations, and their role is to inform non-Luxembourgers about the voting processes for the communal elections of June 2023.
To date, 50 people have already signed up for this training course, which is divided into two three-hour sessions. During the last elections in 2017, 230 multipliers signed up. One of them was Crina Eniţă, the president of the Luxembourg-Romania association. Eniţă explains that she took this decision because she realised the importance of directly informing her own community. One of her main goals is to ensure that those who are eligible to vote do not miss the registration deadline on 17 April.
“I noticed that 40 Romanians registered in 2016, and that figure increased to 173 in 2017, when I became more proactive.
This warmed my heart, and I told myself, ‘I have to keep going,’ we can’t stop now since it brings results,” Eniţă says.
For these upcoming elections, the voting criteria have changed. Previously, residents had to have lived in Luxembourg for at least five years in order to vote in municipal elections. However, after a majority of MPs voted to repeal the 5-year residence requirement in June 2022, all residents can now vote in municipal elections, even if they have only recently moved, as long as they register 55 days before the vote.
Mertz notes that this means that 68,000 more potential voters can register until 17 April 2023.
CEFIS has found through studies that more people register to vote when they are approached directly. When the multiplier initiative was first introduced in 2011, 17% of international residents voted. In 2017, the figure increased to 23%.
