[jkaplowitz]

Many countries do put restrictions on this. Some examples:

Until literally this year, the UK removed the right to vote after 15 years of living abroad, and Canada even used to restrict that right to just 5 years.

Even now, civilian US citizens living abroad whose intent to return to live in the US is uncertain or who don't intend to return, and Canadian citizens living abroad regardless of intent to return, are only federally guaranteed a right to vote from their last in-country address in federal elections, but often can't vote in state, provincial territorial, or local elections. This is true even if they retain significant ties to the relevant state, province, territory, or locality, like having close family there (including kids too young to vote for whom they're a legal parent), owning property there, operating a business there, or being owed a pension controlled by the relevant level of government.

And the guarantee of a right to vote from abroad in US federal elections is purely statutory, not constitutional - not to mention it has a few gaps in it, like citizens who have never lived in the US and neither of whose parents last lived in a state that allows the right to vote from abroad to descend to the next generation based on last parental residence.

Et cetera.

[chgs]

Indeed the U.K. did not give the right to vote for U.K. citizens living in the EU when there was a vote about stripping their citizenship.

[mike_hearn]

Yes they did. You could vote in the referendum from abroad (I did). There's no such thing as EU citizenship anyway, so nobodies citizenship changed as a result.

[chgs]

Of course there is

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_citizenship

Anyone living for more than 15 years was denied the right to vote but not denied the right to have their citizen forcibly removed against their will.

[mike_hearn]

Well just go ahead and apply to Brussels to get your EU passport back then?

Obviously you can't, because there's no such thing as EU citizenship. It doesn't grant citizenship, and cannot because that would require it to be an independent nation recognized by other nations as such. There is only citizenship of member states. Playing with words doesn't make something real, it only confuses people.

[chgs]

You can state your “alternate facts” all you want while ignoring actual truth, doesn’t make you right.

[jkaplowitz]

You’re right indeed that there is a real legal concept in EU law called EU citizenship, which everyone with the nationality of an EU member state holds. The other commenter is wrong on that point.

But the other commenter is also right that there is not the kind of independently existent EU citizenship that would persist when one ceases to be a national of an EU member state - it gets lost in that case even if the reason for this change is not an individual loss of the member state’s nationality but because the member state withdrew from the EU. The ECJ definitively settled this last year. Nor are EU passports issued on the basis of EU citizenship, nor would EU citizens typically include “EU” as one of the answers if they are asked by a government to list all their citizenships or view themselves as dual citizens if their only national-level citizenship is from a single EU member state.

For several reasons like this, it’s not at all unreasonable for the other commenter not to view EU citizenship as a real citizenship of its own, despite the use of the term under EU law.

Personally, I view the term EU citizenship in part as a briefer shorthand for “national of an EU member state” - including in the definition whatever edge-case handling is appropriate for each country’s special-case territories, and therefore more precise in a predictable way. Beyond that, it’s just a symbolic reflection of the EU’s official aspirational policy goal of ever closer union.