Berlin's quarter-million disenfranchised: Why 25% of residents can't vote

Abdu arrived in Berlin seven years ago almost by accident. An Egyptian software developer, he took a job offer that happened to be in Germany's capital, and what began as circumstance became something deeper. He loves the city's culture, its pace, the way people seem to prioritize living over mere work. He has built a life here. He pays taxes. He contributes. But on September 20, when Berlin holds its state election, he will not be allowed to vote.

He is one of roughly 976,000 adults in a city of 3.9 million who cannot participate in the election because they lack German citizenship. That represents a quarter of Berlin's population—the highest proportion of disenfranchised residents the city has ever recorded. The number has doubled since 2011. And many of those locked out are angry about it.

Abdu's frustration is specific and sharp. He watches campaign posters multiply across the streets. He sees a government he disagrees with—a conservative-led coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party—preparing to defend its record. He has opinions about that record. He has been harmed by some of its decisions. The cuts to health care and German language courses affect him directly. The bureaucratic opacity that makes it nearly impossible for him to start his own business grinds against him daily. The rising rents that squeeze the city squeeze him too. Yet he has no formal voice in any of it. "We are people who pay taxes, but we don't have any representation at all, even on local level," he told Deutsche Welle. The irony is not lost on him, or on the thousands of others in his position.

Germany's structure creates this gap. Across much of Europe, non-citizen residents enjoy voting rights in municipal elections. Citizens of other EU countries can vote in German municipal contests. In London, Commonwealth citizens can vote if they hold residency. Spain has reciprocal agreements with several non-EU nations that extend voting rights to their citizens in municipal elections, including mayoral races in Madrid and Barcelona. But Berlin's September 20 election is not a municipal election. Berlin is one of Germany's 16 federal states, which means this is a state election, and state elections are restricted to citizens only. The municipal elections that do allow EU citizens to vote in Berlin have limited power—they decide who governs individual districts, nothing more. For the quarter-million disenfranchised, even that narrow door is mostly closed.

The exclusion is sharpest in central Berlin. Stefanie Remlinger, the Green Party mayor of the Mitte district, has tried to address it through a symbolic gesture. She organized a "symbolic election" for the roughly 135,000 non-German adults in her district—out of a total population of 365,000. Over two weeks in early September, 15 ballot stations invited foreigners to cast votes that would carry no legal weight, a performance designed to signal that their opinions matter even if the law says they don't. "Mitte is an extremely heterogeneous district with a very international population," Remlinger said. "We have people from 170 different countries living here, and a lot of them don't have the right to vote. It's important to us to signal to those people that we value their opinions, that we see them." She expected only a few hundred to participate. The symbolic vote is a small thing, but it acknowledges a real wound.

The political climate makes any real solution seem distant. Even in cosmopolitan Berlin, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party is polling in second place at nearly 20 percent. Remlinger, speaking from her office, was blunt about the obstacles: "We're fighting a rightward shift and a lot of hostility to immigration, and I think the chances of changing something on that issue right now are very bad." She pointed to a recent panel discussion where a politician from the Free Democratic Party—a party that markets itself as socially liberal—argued against extending voting rights to foreigners, claiming they might start their own parties and seize control of government. The absurdity of the argument was not lost on Remlinger, but neither was its political weight.

Abdu is aware of this drift. He has begun considering leaving Germany altogether. "All the parties are trending right-wing, so it's getting more hostile," he said. That possibility carries economic weight. Germany faces a projected shortage of 440,000 workers by 2029. The country needs people like Abdu—skilled, educated, already embedded in the economy. Even the AfD acknowledges that immigrants who contribute economically have a place in the discussion. Yet offering those immigrants a real vote remains politically toxic in most quarters.

Remlinger's preferred path is not to expand voting rights but to make citizenship easier to obtain. That would solve Abdu's problem, except it hasn't. He applied for German citizenship two years ago and received no response. Germany recently tightened its citizenship rules again, reversing a three-year fast-track option that had been introduced under the previous chancellor. The government did preserve a five-year residency pathway to citizenship, and 2025 saw about 39,000 people naturalized in Berlin—17,000 more than the year before. But Abdu remains in limbo, waiting for a response that has not come. In the meantime, he described his position with a metaphor that cuts to the bone: "If I could vote, I would reconsider leaving, to be honest, because then I could affect things, but now I'm just like a bank machine—they come to me and take half of my salary." On September 20, he will watch the election happen without him, one of a quarter-million people whose stake in Berlin's future has been deemed legally irrelevant.