100 Years of Universal Voting Rights

On the 26th October 1919, women were allowed to vote for the first time in Luxembourg in the parliamentary elections. However, universal suffrage which was voted on the 8th May referred not only to women; it also included a very large number of lower-income male citizens who had previously been excluded based on the right-to-vote census.

Universal suffrage was not only an active right, which is to say the right to vote; it was also passive in the sense that it opened up the possibility of candidacy. In the parliamentary elections in 1919 only one single woman was elected.