There is perhaps still a minority of foreigners who are unaware that they can vote in municipal elections. ASTI thinks not and accuses politicians of lacking commitment.
Politicians have not made sufficient efforts to encourage foreigners to register on the electoral lists. This is the observation made by the Association for the Support of Immigrant Workers (ASTI) in an open letter sent to the editorial staff on Friday. When Candida Esteves heard about this letter, she exploded.
Municipal councilor (DP) in Mondorf-les-Bains, of Portuguese nationality, president of the Integration Commission, she refutes the reproaches formulated by ASTI and considers that those who are still unaware today that they have the right going to vote in municipal elections are really not interested in what is happening around them and, by deduction, even less in local politics.
“During National Registration Day, on March 18, we organized a multicultural tasting of culinary products with 13 countries that participated, and on arrival, we had fifty registrations”, informs the elected official, rather satisfied with the result given the lack of general enthusiasm for this right to vote.
She had Belgians, French, Spaniards, Portuguese too, but very few. However, Candida Esteves struggles in the Portuguese community to convince people of the importance of going to vote in the municipal elections.
“If communities could not be reached by the national campaign or local initiatives, then I think embassies and consulates could have informed their fellow citizens,” she observes. Perfectly Luxembourgish, she has never felt the need to ask for a nationality other than her own, of which she says she is proud and which is enough for her. On the other hand, she recognizes that language can be a barrier. “You have to communicate systematically in French and English and the most concerned also do it in Portuguese,” she says. For local life, it is important.
At the national level, the campaign is multilingual, while politics is less and less so. How many elected officials take the trouble to communicate in a language other than Luxembourgish on social networks? Little. They are aimed at an audience that already has the right to vote, in general.
But politicians, especially at the local level, boast of proximity to voters, forgetting that lots of foreigners do not understand what they say or write. At each deadline, they translate their electoral program and switch back to Luxembourgish mode to communicate on social networks without worrying about foreigners who have no knowledge of the language.
ASTI’s solution: automatic registration
When the ASTI declares that “few foreigners” are aware of their right to vote, it is unthinkable. The messages were passed on to the buses, the campaign was relayed on all media and in several languages, the networks were of great help and the stands set up at major events too. There is simply no interest in the political thing.
ASTI again criticizes the politicians for having left it up to the communities alone to encourage their compatriots to register on the lists. “Multipliers” have been specially trained for this mission. “Why haven’t secondary school teachers (teachers of life and society and history classes, for example), municipal and administrative officials or elected municipal officials also been trained as multipliers? Why leave this task mainly to foreigners, when it concerns us all?”, questions the association.
The Mondorfoise adviser believes that she has sufficiently fulfilled her task as a multiplier, but at some point, we have to face the facts. Only 12% are registered nationally and more than 50% of long-time residents are still unregistered. Impossible to believe that they escaped all the media campaigns.
What is missing then? The sincere commitment of elected officials, according to ASTI. “Some elected officials and parties are openly involved in the campaign to register foreigners for the municipal elections, but the involvement of politicians in the campaign is limited, for the vast majority, to a few symbolic appearances and speeches in front of targeted audiences and already convinced.”
The solution proposed by the association? Automatically register all new foreign residents, notifying them that they just have to unregister if they do not intend to participate in the vote. “A simple procedure that would bring us closer to the democracy to which, it is to be hoped, we aspire.”
For now, foreigners remain free to register until April 17. And to know everything, it’s on the site jepeuxvoter.lu.