This blog post has been contributed by Dr Oana Stefan, Module Convenor for EU law.
This blog post deals with two cases issued in November 2024 touching on various aspects related to our course: EU citizenship, political rights, as well as EU values such as democracy. As such, it deals with several topics of the syllabus: 5, 11, 12.
We shall first of all recall that, as the Court laid out in C-184/99 Grzelczyk, EU citizenship is the fundamental status of the nationals of the Member States. In our analysis so far, we have explored in detail the right of citizens to move and reside in other Member States, but we have not explored much of EU citizens’ political rights. These are laid out in the Treaty, as well as in the Charter of Fundamental rights. Of interest for this blog is Article 22 of the TFEU providing that ‘every citizen of the Union residing in a Member State of which he is not a national shall have the right to vote and to stand as a candidate at municipal elections in the Member State in which he resides, under the same conditions as nationals of that State.’
The two cases concerned Polish and Czech legislation conferring the right to become a member of a political party only on nationals of those Member States. The European Commission challenged this legislation in front of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It argued that this prevented resident, non-national, EU citizens from exercising their right to stand as a candidate in municipal and European elections under the same conditions as Czech and Polish nationals. In particular, the Commission submitted that Article 22 TFEU enshrined a general principle of equal treatment. As a result, it was important that Member States abolished the nationality requirement as a prerequisite for standing as a candidate in the elections. The Polish and Czech laws did not prohibit non-national resident EU citizens from being elected to political posts. However, the fact that these mobile EU citizens could not join a political party did put them in a less favourable position than candidates for election who were members of a party.
The Court agreed with the Commission in these two cases and held that the Polish and Czech legislation infringed EU law. It established that Article 22 TFEU lays out a right to participate in the democratic process of a Member State, and not just the right to vote and stand as a candidate for elections. What is more, Article 22 TFEU applies to ‘any national measure giving rise to a difference in treatment liable to undermine the effective exercise of those rights’ (C808/21, para. 96; C-814/21, para. 95). The Court determined that EU citizens who exercised their free movement rights and are now residing in a Member State of which they are not nationals, must also be able to exercise effectively their electoral rights in municipal and European elections. Consequently, they should also have access to all the means available to nationals of that Member State for the purpose of exercising those rights effectively. The chances to be elected are enhanced considerably by being a member of a political party, given that such members enjoy substantial support, know-how, and resources available to parties. So, by not allowing non-national residents to join such parties, the legislation at stake put mobile EU citizens at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Polish and Czech nationals.
Significantly, the Court established a link between the rights of Article 22 TFEU and the principle of democracy, laid out in Article 10 (1) TEU. Article 10 (1) TEU was also seen as giving concrete expression to democracy as a value under Article 2 TEU. As such, political parties ‘fulfil an essential function in the system of representative democracy, on which the functioning of the European Union is founded.’ (C-808/21 para 121; C-814/21 para 119). As explained by Schuler, the significance of these judgment exceeds the right to stand as candidate in elections, as they ‘pave the way for the enforcement of the value of democracy under Article 10 TEU.’
The judgments are also connected to the cases on rule of law backsliding that we have been studying as part of Topic 12 (see mini lecture 2) and resistance to supremacy (Topic 5, Mini Lecture 3). Indeed, Poland and the Czech Republic argued that the national legislation responded to the need to protect national identity as per Article 4 (2) TEU, which is a frequent argument raised recently to oppose the primacy of European Union law. The Court dismissed this point, by stating that Article 4 (2) TEU must be read in the light of Articles 2 and 10 TEU and ‘cannot exempt Member States from the obligation to comply with the requirements arising from those provisions’ (C-808/21 para 158; C-814/21 para 155). Member States have however some discretion to limit membership rights for non-nationals, such as, for instance, specific rules on decision-making within a political party regarding the nomination of candidates in national elections.