Political Rights for All! How to Robustly Protect EU’s Citizens from Political Domination

In this article, I argue that the democratic deficit of the EU cannot be fully dealt with without granting EU citizens immediate access to transnational political rights. Access to such rights, I will argue, does not require EU’s transformation into a federal constitutional order. It also implies immediate access to social rights as well. The argument proceeds in the following steps. Section II provides an overview of recent literature on EU citizens’ access to political rights and assesses the argument that the exercise of such rights requires first the transformation of the EU into a federal constitutional order. Section III provides three arguments as to why the exercise of political rights by EU citizens, in both local and general elections, does not necessitate the acquisition of national citizenship in the host member-state. Section IV shows why granting EU citizens immediate access to transnational political rights necessarily entails granting them also access to transnational social rights and argues that such immediate access, to both political and social rights, is compatible with the current constitutional order of the EU as an international, rather than transnational, institution. This section also supports the claim that combined access to political and social rights provides EU citizens with a robust form of protection from risks associated with political domination due to nationals’ exclusive access to political rights, risks of particular gravity in European states backsliding on democracy and the role of law. Section V examines a number of objections, while section VI concludes.