The big picture
- There are some 11,000 eligible international voters in Leuven (and just over 66,000 Belgian voters).
- In the 2018 Leuven elections:
- Only 10% of internationals voted.
- Less than 2300 votes determined the winning party.
- 9400 internationals didn’t vote.
- While Belgians are automatically registered, internationals have to actively register.
- Many international Leuvenaars don’t know they can vote, how to register or who to vote for.
- IHL has been taking a deep dive into various data sources to explore the numbers and data surrounding international voting in Leuven.
Data from the 2018 Leuven election
Looking back at the previous elections, internationals made up 20% of the Leuven population. However, less than 10% of the 10,442 eligible internationals registered to vote.
Only a couple of thousand votes determine the outcome of the elections in Leuven. So if all the internationals voted, it could have a decisive effect.
Which international nationalities have the biggest share of the Leuven vote?
We've pulled the data to show top 10 EU and non-EU international voter groups by country of origin.
So why the swing vote?
Belgians are automatically registered to vote, but internationals have to actively sign up a few months before the actual elections.
In practice, this means that there isn't a tradition of voter registration campaigns like in some other countries. This has a knock-on effect that internationals don't get access to the right information in time to sign up. And, by the time everyone is talking about the local elections it's too late for many internationals to register.
As of June 2024, 11,432 internationals are eligible to vote in Leuven. If everyone voted, that would be 14,7% of the Leuven vote. But, as of June only 879 had registered. Meaning that internationals would make up only 1.31% of the local vote.
A swing vote is defined as:
"a vote that is regarded as decisive to the outcome of an election because it is not predictable which candidate or party it will be cast for."
Internationals in Leuven fit this. They can change the outcome of the elections by sheer volume, but it's unpredictable how many people will register and who they will vote for.
So internationals in Leuven are the swing vote and can really influence what life in Leuven will look like over the next six years.
Have you signed up to vote yet?