Two decades after its formal institutionalization, the citizenship of the Union still remains a key topic of the political parlance regarding the democratic future of the EU. Often presented as one of the most substantive indicators of the reconfiguration of the traditional paradigm of citizenship in a new era of increasing migration flows, this political instrument of the European integration has been analyzed mostly from a normative perspective. Hence, while some authors tried to expose its limitations through the conceptual triangle national citizenship-European citizenship- supranational citizenship, others emphasized its transformative potential, as an efficient way to ´´create´´ the European demos. Unlike these approaches, the present study seeks to open another paradigm vis-à-vis this concept, focusing on the exercise of the political rights granted to the EU non-nationals in the Maastricht Treaty. Drawing on European and local elections held subsequently to 1999 in the EU Member States, this paper proceeds to explore the virtues and limits of the European citizenship, trying to assess how the EU foreigners assume their status of European citizens in the political sphere. As a consequence, the study will provide empirical evidence regarding the political link between citizenship and migration at the EU level, focusing on the real practice of the current political model of the EU citizenship in order to test the boundaries of convergence and divergence of electoral involvement among the EU foreigners residing in the Member States.
