When the Vienna City Council is re-elected on April 27, more than a third of the city’s residents will not be able to participate. Over 35 percent of eligible voters in Vienna are not entitled to vote due to lacking Austrian citizenship, setting a new record for the growing proportion of non-voters.
In recent years, the proportion of eligible voters in Vienna’s population has steadily decreased. In the 1980s, more than 90 percent of adults in Vienna had the right to vote. This dropped below 80 percent for the first time in 2010, despite lowering the voting age to 16. By the 2015 municipal election, over a quarter of Vienna’s residents of voting age were excluded from voting.
Only around 70 percent of residents in Vienna were eligible to vote in the 2015 municipal election. In the national election last autumn, the proportion of eligible voters in Vienna dropped below two-thirds for the first time, and it has continued to decline, now falling to under 65 percent. According to data from Statistics Austria, around 1.1 million eligible voters are contrasted with approximately 610,000 non-Austrians of voting age residing in Vienna. This amounts to 35.4 percent of the population. Nationally, as of January 1, 19.7 percent of people over 16 are not eligible to vote.
Symbolic “Pass-egal-Wahl” Ahead of the Election
More than a third of the non-voters in Vienna come from the EU. Approximately 260,000 EU citizens living in Vienna can vote in district council elections but, unlike in other municipalities, cannot vote for the city council as it also functions as the state parliament, and participation in state elections is constitutionally reserved for Austrian citizens. Although the number of EU citizens eligible to vote in Vienna’s districts has increased in recent years, their voter turnout is traditionally low. In 2020, only 20.4 percent of eligible voters from other EU countries cast their votes, with an overall turnout of 57.7 percent.
Warnings about the increasing proportion of non-voters as a democratic issue have been raised for years. The organization SOS Mitmensch states that Vienna is on the path to becoming a “half democracy,” predicting that by 2050 only half of the population will be eligible to vote.
The NGO, which will again hold a symbolic “Pass-egal-Wahl” (Pass-No-Matter Election) ahead of the Vienna elections, sees the problem not only in immigration but also in the restrictive access to Austrian citizenship. Even the new three-party coalition is unlikely to change this, as the government program plans to tighten the requirements for language skills. Only those with urgently needed professions will have relaxed financial requirements.
Non-Voter Proportion Highest Near the Belt
Within Vienna, the proportion of non-voters is unevenly distributed: the district of Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus has the highest proportion at 45.9 percent, followed by Favoriten (44.2 percent) and Brigittenau (44.4 percent). At the other end of the spectrum is Hietzing, with only 24.5 percent.
An APA analysis of data from the Vienna Regional Statistics reveals that non-voters are most concentrated near the city’s belt. In Central Favoriten, more than half of those over 16 have no voting rights (53.1 percent), while in the southern parts of the 10th district (Laaer Berg and Siedlung Südost, as well as Ober- and Unterlaa), only 17.1 and 19.8 percent are non-voters, respectively.
