Denmark’s election rules allow foreign residents of the country to vote in local elections, but restrictions apply for non-EU nationals. How do the rules apply to British citizens?
Unlike with parliamentary elections, you do not have to be a Danish citizen to vote in regional elections (regionalvalg) or municipal elections (kommunalvalg) in Denmark.
Hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals who live in Denmark are eligible to vote in the upcoming regional and municipal elections, which are held on the same day and are often referred to as local elections.
Foreign nationals can be eligible to vote in the elections if they fulfil a number of criteria.
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Any person over the age of 18 who is legally resident in a Danish municipality can vote in both the municipal and regional elections.
Citizens of EU countries as well as Iceland and Norway can vote in the local elections provided they are legally resident in Denmark (regardless of length of stay).
However, people who are not citizens of an EU country, Iceland or Norway must have lived in Denmark for at least the last four years prior to the vote.
The United Kingdom fell into the former category when it was an EU member state. This status was changed by Brexit, but a treaty agreed between Denmark and the UK in 2024 means that British and Danish citizens can again stand and vote in local elections in each other’s countries.
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As such, the UK can be grouped with Iceland and Norway as non-EU countries which are treated as equivalent to EU countries when it comes to their citizens voting in Danish local elections.
This is a notable difference from the 2021 local elections, which took place after Brexit but before the 2024 treaty.
In the 2021 local elections, Denmark had imposed the four-year minimum residence requirement to Britons who moved to the country after “Brexit Day” (January 31st, 2020).
That is no longer the case, so if you are a British national over the age of 18 with legal residence in a Danish municipality, you are eligible to vote, regardless of how long you have lived in Denmark.
Statistics Denmark figures up to the third quarter of 2023 showed that 5,388 British citizens who had moved to Denmark in the prior four years would benefit from the Denmark-UK treaty. That number will have grown further in the two years since.