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Europe|The U.K. Plans to Lower the Voting Age to 16. Here’s What to Know.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/world/europe/uk-voting-age-16.html
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A guide to what’s being described as Britain’s largest expansion of voting rights in decades.
July 17, 2025, 9:45 a.m. ET
The British government said on Thursday that it would allow 16- and 17-year olds to vote, in what it described as a landmark moment for democracy and some of its opponents decried as an attempt to tilt the electoral playing field.
Analysts have described the plan as the country’s largest expansion of voting rights in decades. The last nationwide reduction in voting age, to 18 from 21, came more than 50 years ago.
“Declining trust in our institutions and democracy itself has become critical, but it is the responsibility of government to turn this around and renew our democracy, just as generations have done before us,” the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, wrote in an introduction to a policy paper that included the announcement.
The plan also includes promises to tighten laws on foreign donations to political parties, and to simplify voter registration.
Here’s a guide to the change and its implications.
Do many places give 16-year-olds the vote?
Several nations do, including Austria, Malta and Brazil, while in Greece the voting age is set at 17. Others allow 16-year-olds to participate only in some elections: In Greece and Belgium, they can help choose members of the European Parliament, but they cannot vote in federal elections. Britain has been in that category: Elections for the separate parliaments that control many policy areas in Scotland and Wales already had a voting age of 16.
Is this change a surprise?
No. The center-left Labour Party has backed votes for 16-year-olds for some time, and the idea was part of the official platform on which it won last year’s general election.
