After Lithuania’s second referendum to allow dual citizenship failed on Sunday, MP Dalia Asanavičiūtė, who initiated it, suggests amending the Law on Citizenship to allow Lithuanian citizens in EU and NATO member states to keep their Lithuanian passports.
Asanavičiūtė says the second failed referendum has put Lithuania into “a situation of legal impossibility” where dual citizenship cannot be expanded through a constitutional amendment, so she proposes to narrow down the list of countries whose citizenship Lithuanians could acquire without losing their Lithuanian citizenship.
“That’s why I have registered [...] amendments to the Law on Citizenship. The bill proposes that Lithuanian citizenship could be retained by Lithuanian citizens by birth who left Lithuania after March 11, 1990, and acquired, not by birth, the citizenship of a member state of NATO and a member state of the organization’s partner European Union,” she said in a press release on Monday.
Further reading
This would narrow down the list of countries whose citizens could retain their Lithuanian passports. This could be considered as “a separate, rare exception in line with the Constitutional doctrine”, the MP of the ruling conservative Homeland Union-Lithuanian Christian Democrats (TS-LKD) said.
Provisional results from the Central Electoral Commission show that 1,413,288 people, or 58.96 percent of all voters, participated in the referendum.
Of them, 1,026,408, or 74.13 percent, voted “yes”, but it was not enough to amend Article 12 of the constitution which requires more than 50 percent of all eligible voters.
A total of 2,385,234 voters were eligible to vote in Sunday’s referendum, meaning that at least 1,192,617 “yes” votes were needed.
Asanavičiūtė said in a press conference later on Monday that despite the setback, the results show that the Lithuanian public “in principle supports the idea of retaining citizenship”.
In the 2019 citizenship referendum, 956,564 people, or 38 percent of all voters, backed the proposed amendment.
Parliament speaker: another referendum possible
Parliament Speaker Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen has said she does not rule out holding another referendum on dual citizenship in the future.
Čmilytė-Nielsen noted that "there are no easy solutions” to broaden dual citizenship and remains open to the idea of holding another referendum.
“There’s a clear path that we’ve already taken twice; it seems that we’re getting closer to the result, but we’re still falling short. That’s the democratic will of the voters,” the speaker told a press conference on Monday.
“I won’t speculate on what will happen in five years, but all options should be considered, and I don’t completely rule out a repeat referendum if there’s a broad political will,” she added.
Čmilytė-Nielsen believes that the growing voter turnout in presidential elections might lead to a favourable outcome for supporters of dual citizenship in a referendum.
“I hoped for success, even though the threshold is high,” the speaker said. “We can see that there’s a lot of support [for dual citizenship], but the threshold is also very high.”
“There's disappointment that we fell short this time; I can’t hide that,” she added.
However, Čmilytė-Nielsen thinks that lowering the threshold for the referendum “isn’t a good way to go”.
“This creates other risks and problems, which have been discussed many times,” she said.
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
