By Katty Kay
US special correspondent
Last year I became a Swiss citizen. It was a three-year battle of will (mine) over bureaucracy (theirs). I won. I have my grandmother to thank.
I now have an elegant Swiss passport, the right to live anywhere in Europe, the theoretical chance to buy property in Switzerland and, more exciting than any of that, I have the right to vote.
I haven’t voted in almost two decades. I’m British but I have lived abroad so long that I lost my right to vote in the UK. I’m not American, so I can’t vote in the country I live in. For years I’ve been disenfranchised.
Now I get to vote again. A lot. We Swiss take voting as seriously as on-time trains and perfectly constructed wood piles.