Remus Gabriel Anghel1; 1 The Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Romania
Discussion
Migrants’ involvement into politics and their voting behaviour for countries of origin have been intensely debated in the past ten years. Recent scholarship looked at the ways in which they may transfer back home political remittances and critically scrutinize their political values. This paper builds on this vibrant scholarship, however it argues for extending migrants’ and returnees’ political values, choices and activities by looking at the ways in which they are involved into social activism and how their activism is often intermingled to local politics. I thereby unfold two main ways in which returnees are involving politics at the local level: social activism that is becoming a part of activities of political parties, such as local German forum in the southern Transylvania, and another by which they partner with political parties or locally elected politicians, in coping with different challenges that their localities are going through.
