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How the Rich Still Get EU Citizenship Fast in 2026 · IMI Podcasts

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: In 2025, the EU Court of Justice killed citizenship by investment in Europe.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Malta, Cyprus, Montenegro, North Macedonia, all gone.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: The European Commission has repeatedly passed rules to make investor naturalizations difficult.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: What Brussels did not and cannot kill though is what the wealthy already know.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Nearly three in every four countries have an older, quieter path to citizenship without a price list or published process.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2026, it's become the new shadow market of investment migration.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get into what's to come, first let's discuss how we got there.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: One word did all the damage: transactional.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: The EU's Court of Justice decided that citizenship in an EU member state cannot be sold through formulaic, structured, price-tagged programs, and that decision ended the era of formal citizenship by investment programs in European Union countries.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Programs in Malta, Cyprus, Montenegro, and North Macedonia are now done.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Brussels had been pushing this outcome for years.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Commission viewed formal CBI as a direct threat to what it calls European values, meaning the ideal that citizenship is a status earned through connection to a country, not a product sold on a shelf.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Fair or not, that position won in court.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the ruling did not touch investors and entrepreneurs' demand for alternative citizenship in the European Union.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: The industry, for which IMI is the publication of record built around serving that buyer, is still intact.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And a second older path to citizenship has been operating in the background this entire time.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Not only in Europe, but all around the world.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: There is an old Chinese proverb.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Above there are policies, below there are countermeasures.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: For centuries it has described what happens when authorities restrict something people still want.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: In this case, demand does not disappear, it simply reroots.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Investors still want EU citizenship.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: That has not changed.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Tax optimization, travel freedom, family security, optionality against political risk at home.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: None of those motivations went away because a court issued a ruling, and the advisors who built their businesses around serving those buyers are not walking away from a market still worth billions.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the market did what markets do.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: It found the workaround.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Citizenship by merit, also called citizenship by decree, by exception or by discretion, is the oldest form of non-native citizenship on earth.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: It predates modern citizenship by investment by centuries, and according to the IMI Citizenship Catalogue, which you can access as an IMI sovereign member, 74% of all countries already have it written into their nationality laws.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: The mechanism is simple.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: A country's government, usually the President, the Prime Minister, or Parliament, has the legal authority to grant citizenship to anyone it considers deserving of it.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the question on your mind is probably how you qualify.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Typically it's a significant contribution in sciences, arts, sports, business, or similar fields.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: That is the standard, and it is deliberately vague.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: In most countries, this provision is used once a decade for an exceptional case.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: When the French president granted French citizenship to a Malian migrant for an act of bravery, that was citizenship by merit used exactly as the law intended.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: But a handful of countries have used the same provision for decades in a different way.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Austria, the most prominent example, has granted citizenship by merit to hundreds of individuals in exchange for major economic contributions.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Serbia has built a more recent practice of granting citizenship in exchange for investments in the country.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And during the years Brussels was hammering Malta and Cyprus in the press for its formal citizenship by investment programs, not a single official complaint was raised about Austria.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Austria has no program at all.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, it has a provision, a legal pathway that allows the executive branch or parliament to grant citizenship at its discretion.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Brussels knows the legal difference.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, five characteristics separate citizenship by merit from the citizenship by investment programs the EU has killed.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Each one is why CBM survives where CBI did not.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Number five is case-by-case evaluation.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: There is no standardized box ticking process, so every application is reviewed individually, which means the government keeps full discretion at every step.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: It also means there is no formula for the EU to point at and call transactional.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Number four is nebulous criteria, what qualifies as a significant contribution.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: The law does not publish any thresholds, quotas, or tiered investment tables.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: This ambiguity is what shields CBM from legal challenge.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Firms that operate in this space can discern roughly the de facto price floor.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Number three is speed.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Traditional naturalization is the slowest route available.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: CBI is faster because it compresses that timeline into an application process with fixed steps.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: CBM is faster still, because it skips the process entirely.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: A citizenship granted by presidential or parliamentary decree does not require residency or a language test.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: So the time between filing a case and receiving a passport can be measured in months.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Number two is opacity.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike CBI programs, which sometimes publish approval statistics, processing times, investment thresholds, and application requirements, CBM operates without public visibility.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: There are no lists of approved applicants, no official price tags, no press releases.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: The approval moves quietly through the executive branch, and the first the public hears of it, if it hears at all, is usually years later.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, number one.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: The feature that matters most is CBM's shield from EU scrutiny.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Brussels has aggressively targeted formal CBI programs for years, but CBM is viewed as a sovereign prerogative of individual member states.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Every country has the right to decide who it considers deserving of their citizenship.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is the shadow market.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Legal, discreet, operating in plain view of anyone who knows where to look.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: The countries most likely to expand citizenship by merit in 2026 are the ones that wanted to launch formal CBI programs and were scared off by the threat of the geopolitical powers that be.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: That list includes several Balkan states, a handful of Caucasus countries, and some Latin American nations.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: All have constitutional provisions for citizenship by merit already on the books, governments motivated to raise capital, and now a clear example in Austria and Serbia showing how to do it without triggering Brussels.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: This will not look like a launch or a press release, or a glossy website page with pricing and process.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: A small number of well-connected firms in the region will start whispering to clients that paths have opened, and a small number of approvals will happen each quarter.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: After all this, though, you're probably wondering how much you can expect citizenship to cost.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: In most cases, CBM is considerably more expensive than CBI is.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: There is no published minimum investment or structure, so every case is price-based on the applicant's profile, the advisor's relationships, and the specific country's current appetite.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Moreover, consultancies working on these cases charge higher fees than they did for CBI work, because the work is far more personalized and the relationships required are rarer.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: A CBI application was a checklist.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: A CBM case, on the other hand, is a hand-holding negotiation, which is why the professional you choose matters more in the CBM era than it did before.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can find credible experienced investment migration professionals at imidaly.com slash IMI Professionals.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: The tension playing out across the industry right now is whether CBM can be scaled without attracting the same scrutiny that killed CBI.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: You want the predictability of a fixed price, and the industry wants the predictability of a repeatable process.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So the work happening right now is to find the middle ground.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Enough standardization to make the industry scalable, enough discretion and case-by-case variance to make it defensible as a sovereign merit-based grant.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now that you understand how to get EU citizenship in 2026, the next question is where to live once you have it.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: A passport opens the door.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Your tax residency determines how much of your wealth you keep once you are through it.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: We made a video on the five EU countries that refuse to tax your foreign income.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it is the natural companion to this one.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Watch it on your screen now.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Subscribe and turn on notifications so you do not miss the next program update.