Where everyone votes all the time

February 9: Swiss Referendum
Discrimination based on sexual orientation should be prosecutable
Yes: 62%
No: 38%

Switzerland has voted as many times as all of the other countries in the world put together in the past century. The Swiss vote practically all the time. Every three months, to be exact. 

Recent Swiss initiatives have tackled the dehorning of cattle, a minaret building ban, phasing out of nuclear energy and the establishment of a national minimum wage of 4,000 Swiss francs per month. In February, the canton of Geneva voted on whether or not to abolish a tax for dog owners (no) while the entire country was asked if they agreed or not with the Parliament’s recent proposal to criminalize homophobic behavior (yes). These initiatives can add up to dozens of topics in the busiest voting months. 

The process works like this: Individuals, political parties or advocacy groups submit proposals. After a text is green-lit by the Federal Chancellery in Bern, they have 18 months to gather 100,000 signatures. Initiatives are usually tailored by political parties. It could be that they want to push for a major social or political change or deem a new law voted by the Parliament unfair. (The latter differs a little bit from a typical popular initiative, and is called a “referendum,” a false cognate meaning that the public disagrees with Parliament on a measure or law and requires the assent of the people to settle the matter. For this, the threshold is 50,000 signatures.) 

Mathias Reynard, a socialist member of parliament, had a direct experience of the push-pull of the Swiss system last month: after years of slow progress in Parliament, he was able to push through a parliamentary initiative that criminalizes homophobia and expands an existing law criminalizing racial discrimination, despite being part of a small political minority. In reaction to this proposal, a tiny, far-right party known as the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland (UDF) retaliated by waging a campaign on the need to protect freedom of expression. Their slogan was “no to censorship.” 

“We had been working on this for 7 years,”  Reynard recalled when we spoke by phone. “When we entered the campaign phase, I had knots in my stomach.” In the end, the referendum was rebuffed, and Reynard’s plan won 62 percent of federal votes. 

Nationalistic proposals have in some instances been validated by the popular vote, showing the limits of consensus in a country dominated by a conservative culture. In 2009, members of the Democratic Union of the Center (or UDC), Switzerland’s largest party, a nationalist party ranging from center-right to far-right stances, won 57 percent of federal votes for their proposal to ban minarets in the country.  

This coming May, the UDC will offer an initiative “for a controlled immigration,” that aims at limiting the fundamental principle of free movement of people between Switzerland and countries in the European Union. The party’s leader opened the campaign in February with a statement linking immigration to the country’s rising carbon emissions.  If it passes, the initiative would put an end to the current bilateral agreement with the EU and kick Switzerland out of the Schengen-passport control system, as well as the Dublin accord on asylum. (The campaign is vague on other specifics.) For this reason, some observers are already calling it “a Swiss Brexit.”

Sometimes, a more opportunistic approach takes hold: the young Radical-Liberals who launched a text calling for the suppression of audiovisual license fees (fees for watching and listening to the country’s public TV and radio broadcasters) didn’t hide that they came up with the idea while brainstorming in a bar, looking for something catchy that would make them known on a national scale. Their initiative would have decimated the country’s entire state-supported media system, from television stations to radio.

Individuals can also propose legislation. The most recent example is Armin Capaul, a farmer from the rural Grisons region who, in 2018, captured the country’s attention with his proposal to financially support Swiss cattle breeders who don't dehorn cattle. Outside the country, the proposal  earned a few laughs. Inside the country, it led to a weeks-long debate on the well being of animals. Still, it lost by a small margin.

The success of an initiative depends greatly on how much budget parties and individuals have to gather signatures in the first place. Only 10 percent of voted initiatives pass. Many consider seeing the initiative being covered in the news and part of the general conversation a victory in itself—albeit a symbolic one. A win or loss by a big margin can make or break a party. The Green Party has yet to recover from the 8% of votes obtained in 2015 for its energy tax initiative.

One  recent trend consists to hire Swiss companies to collect signatures: For 2 to 5 Swiss francs ($2.09 to $5.23) a signature, according to the perceived level of difficulty of the topic, the companies will gather the 100,000 signatures by approaching potential signers on the street. The recent boom of companies in the business of collecting signatures creates a twofold problem: First, parties with larger budgets have a higher chances of passing  the signature phase, as hiring a company requires being able to spend at least 200,000 francs ($207,267) before a campaign even begins. Second, because these companies hire underpaid staffers to collect signatures, these workers can be tempted to lie about the core of the initiative, and are sometimes encouraged to do so by their employer in order to achieve their task faster. 

Reynard was able to capture a video of one of those underpaid workers, while he was telling people that the initiative launched by the far right party UDF was in favor of LGBT rights. The man was employed by INCOP, the largest company specialized in signature collection in francophone Switzerland. (INCOP does not seem to stand for anything.) Reynard recalls: ”I thought that, the UDF being such a small party, they would have a hard time gathering the 50,000 signatures. In fact, they got 70,000 of them! I’m by no means saying that all of these 70,000 are due to fraud, but we know for a fact that the company’s workers lied throughout to signers, by telling them the initiative aimed at combating homophobia.” Reynard has started to work on a text in Parliament which would ban the use of such companies. 

A few weeks ahead of each vote, Swiss citizens receive a very neatly laid-out, roughly 100-page booklet that outlines the issues at stake in the election, in the language of the canton they live in. Written by the Federal Council, the executive body of the Swiss confederation, it aims to illustrate the arguments and counter-arguments of all the initiatives at stake. 

To me, the most fascinating aspect of this participatory democracy is how often the Swiss seem to vote against their own interests, by refusing a sixth week of paid holidays, more comfortable retirement plans or a national minimum wage that would be the envy of all neighboring countries. The Swiss essayist Jean Ziegler calls this phenomenon the ”opacity of the consensus:” “a dominant ideology to which very few Swiss citizens, even among the most lucid, can escape.” 

On top of this, depending on how educated you are, your background, whether or not you belong to a minority, you may be more prone, albeit unconsciously, to think of yourself as not qualified enough to express your take on a topic you feel you are not equipped to analyze or comprehend in depth. A friend of mine once told me she voted against Capaul’s dehorning initiative. At the beginning of the campaign she was “emotionally supportive of” because when she had to vote, the dominant economic arguments seemed to her like a more rational approach. 

Equally fascinating is how soothing the consensus can feel: most Swiss people would agree that the process of voting on a popular initiative makes it easier to accept the outcome, even when it was not their choice. At least they were part of the process. And it’s not just true for citizens, but for politicians as well. “I belong to the small left-wing minority that consistently loses almost all of the time,” Reynard said. “In the past three years, quite frankly, we lost all of our battles: the minimum wage, the sixth week of paid holidays… but you know what? When the Sunday comes, and we do lose, we tell ourselves that we’ll be back the next day with a new idea.” At least this time he can celebrate a victory.