What happens if you abstain?

At every election, we are reminded that "voting is compulsory for all voters registered on the electoral roll" (except for the over-75s and those who provide a valid excuse), as stated on the elections.lu website.

Citizens have largely complied with this: the last national elections in 2018 counted 233,014 ballot papers for 259,887 registered voters, representing an abstention rate of around 10 percent. This year's elections expect even more voters, with an expected turnout of 283,879 voters.

Nonetheless, the question remains: what happens to those who fail to comply? In theory, unjustified abstention is punishable by a fine, which increases with each repetition.

In practice, it looks a little different. Our colleagues at RTL Infos asked president of Syvicol what were to happen in the event of an unjustified abstention, to which he bluntly replied: "I don't know of a single person who has ever been worried as a result of abstaining. There are penalties, but they are not applied".

The judicial area in Luxembourg. A place where we are not likely to come across many violators of the voting obligation... / © Domaine public

Fines ranging from €100 to €1,000

The penalties in question are hardly ever mentioned; you really have to dive into the electoral law to get more details. According to the law, the state prosecutor draws up a list of registered voters who abstained without justification, and summons them before court.

A first unjustified abstention is punishable by a fine ranging from 100 and 250 euros. In the event of a repeated offence within five years of the conviction, the fine goes from 500 to 1,000 euros.

No sanctions since... 1964?

In the run-up to the local elections, RTL Infos contacted the Ministry of Justice on this subject back in May. The Ministry referred us to a parliamentary reply signed jointly by Xavier Bettel, Félix Braz and Dan Kersch in 2017.

This parliamentary response stated that the last prosecutions brought by the public prosecutor's office against unexcused abstainers date back to 1963 and 1964. Since then, the public prosecutor's office has no longer drawn up a statement for each municipality.

Considering that the public prosecutor's office has the sole discretion to decide whether or not to prosecute, and that such prosecution would also mean that all the people concerned would have to be interviewed individually by the competent authorities, we can conclude that, in practice, abstainers have risked nothing for almost 60 years.

"If there have been no prosecutions since 1964, it's because the procedure laid down by law is very cumbersome. We need to see if a simpler procedure isn't possible," noted Claude Adam (Green Party) back in 2017. Other MPs have called for a review or the introduction of "a system of taxed warnings or administrative penalties"... To no avail, clearly.

What would happen if we were to abolish compulsory voting?

Considering the sanctions aren't actually being applied, why is it that the government insists on compulsory voting?

President of Syvicol replied: "Because, as far as I'm concerned, voting is not just a right, it's a civic duty that has to be taken seriously."
In particular, he fears that in the absence of compulsory voting, a significant proportion of voters would turn away from the ballot box, especially young people. "When we analyse the low political participation of non-Luxembourgers, we see that it is mainly young people who are not registered. Young Luxembourgers, on the other hand, are automatically registered on the electoral roll and are therefore obliged to vote. And I'm afraid that if we didn't have this compulsory voting requirement, Luxembourgers, and especially young Luxembourgers, wouldn't vote as much."