Does the Czech government want to give citizenship to foreigners to sway the vote in its favor? No, that's not true: The Czech government has approved a proposal by lawmakers that would allow descendants of emigrants from Czechoslovakia who were illegally stripped of their citizenship by the communist regime to become citizens of their ancestral country. Some opposition politicians, promoting anti-immigrant sentiment, have suggested it is aimed at giving citizenship to "foreigners" in exchange for votes.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on January 21, 2024, with a caption, translated into English from Czech by Lead Stories staff, that reads:
The government wants to give Czech citizenship to foreigners.
The person speaking in the video is the leader of the opposition party Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), Tomio Okamura, who says in comments also translated from Czech into English by Lead Stories staff:
Imagine that Fiala's five-member coalition government wants to effectively hand out Czech citizenship to foreigners in large numbers in order to influence the elections in its favour.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Jan 23 09:13:31 2024 UTC)
On December 13, 2023, the Czech government approved a proposal (archived here) by lawmakers to amend a law on Czech citizenship to allow great-grandchildren of emigrants from the former communist Czechoslovakia to obtain Czech citizenship (archived here). The amendment streamlines the procedure (archived here), but the descendants of former Czechoslovak citizens would still have to prove a link to their ancestors and their ancestors' citizenship. All emigrants and their children were deprived of citizenship during communist rule between 1949 and 1990.
If a citizenship bill is approved by parliament, it would involve mainly descendants of Czech emigrants in the USA, Latin America, and the UK, according to the explanatory memorandum, which is part of the amendment (archived here).
Okamura also claims the government citizenship proposal is linked to its efforts to introduce absentee voting for Czechs living abroad, something he claims is also designed to sway future voting in its favor. Lead Stories has previously debunked claims linked to government efforts to introduce postal voting for Czechs living abroad here, or here.
A lawmaker who helped write the latest proposal, Eva Decroix, told Lead Stories in a telephone conversation on January 23, 2024, that the issue of how to deal with requests for citizenship from the descendants of emigres has been debated since 2013 and there is no connection with the current debate on absentee voting.
A 2013 law, which is now in effect (archived here), allowed the grandchildren of emigrants to apply for citizenship as well, but gave them only one year to do so.
Decroix, who is a member of the government's Civic Democrats, added:
If there are people abroad who claim to be Czech and their ancestors have Czech blood, we should be proud that this is the case and set up the system fairly, similar to what other European countries have done.
