## Facts

- A German state enacted a 1989 statute amending its municipal and district election law to allow certain foreign nationals to vote and stand for election in local elections.
- Eligibility was limited to nationals of six specified European states (Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland) who met statutory conditions.
- A group of federal legislators and another state government filed an abstract review challenge seeking to invalidate the statute.
- The constitutional court accepted the challenge as admissible, including the ability of one state government to challenge another state’s law in abstract review.
- The challengers argued the law conflicted with constitutional provisions requiring that state authority be democratically legitimated by “the people” through general, direct, free, equal, and secret elections at state and local levels.

## Issues

1. Whether the constitutional term “the people” for elections in states, districts, and municipalities is limited to German citizens (and those constitutionally assimilated), thereby barring local voting rights for non-citizen foreigners.
2. Whether a state may, by ordinary legislation, extend the local electorate to non-citizens consistent with the constitutional principles of democracy and popular sovereignty.
3. Whether the democratic legitimation of public authority must be uniform across federal, state, and local levels, requiring the same constitutionally defined political community to authorize government power.

## Decision

- The court held the challenged provisions unconstitutional and void.
- It ruled that the constitution’s principle that “all state authority emanates from the people” identifies the relevant political community as the state’s people, defined by citizenship.
- For purposes of democratic elections, the constitution presupposes the status of “German” (as defined by constitutional citizenship provisions) as a prerequisite to voting.
- The “people” who elect representative bodies in states, districts, and municipalities must be understood consistently with the constitutional concept of the state people; it is not equivalent to all residents or those affected by local decisions.
- A state lacks authority to redefine the constitutionally fixed electorate for local representative bodies; any expansion to non-citizens would require constitutional change at the federal level.

## Legal Principles

- Popular sovereignty provisions both require democratic legitimation and determine who constitutes the constitutionally relevant “people” for exercising state authority.
- The constitution ties political participation in elections that legitimate public power to citizenship (including constitutionally assimilated persons), not mere residence.
- Democratic legitimation must be attributable to a single constitutionally defined political community across all levels of government, including municipalities and districts when they exercise public authority.
- State autonomy over local government organization does not permit altering the constitutionally required composition of the electorate for representative bodies.
- Policy arguments favoring broader participation by long-term residents cannot override constitutional text and structure absent constitutional amendment.

## Conclusion

The court invalidated a state law granting local voting and candidacy rights to specified foreign nationals, holding that the electorate for local representative bodies is constitutionally limited to Germans (as constitutionally defined) and that states cannot expand that electorate by ordinary legislation.


Foreign Voters Case (Ausländerwahlrecht I), 83 BVerfGE 37 (Bundesverfassungsgericht 1990)