BERN. Eighteen days before Switzerland votes on the War Materiel Act, Christophe Gerber told RTS that looser export rules are a question of survival for the country’s security and defence industry. Gerber chairs the Romandie group for defence and security materiel, the GRPM. Speaking on La Matinale on Wednesday, he said the Swiss market is much too small for these firms. Without exports, he said, they cannot prosper.
The vote on 29 November is on a revision parliament has already passed and a referendum has forced back to the people. The current act bans exports to countries that are in an armed conflict or that commit serious human rights violations, and since 2022 the Federal Council has not been free to waive those tests. The revision would make exceptions for states treated as partners. Wednesday’s RTS account put those partners, above all, in Europe, and also named the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia. For other countries the Federal Council could still grant a derogation. The duty to demand a non-re-export declaration, the promise not to pass Swiss materiel on without Bern’s consent, would be eased as well. Direct exports of arms to Ukraine stay strictly forbidden under neutrality law.
The case he put to the morning audience
Gerber’s economic point is the size of the home market. His security point is what the present law would do if a NATO country were attacked, a possibility he said cannot be ruled out in the coming years. In that case, he argued, no NATO country could receive military materiel from Switzerland. NATO and the European Union, he said, account for 80 per cent of these exports. “The bulk of our exports are not warlords at the other end of the world,” he told RTS. “They are countries regarded as friendly, or at least as sharing Switzerland’s values.”
He also rejected the idea that the bill is an industry lobby writing its own rules. Parliament supports it, he said, and so do the Green Liberals, the Swiss People’s Party, the Free Democratic Party and business more broadly. “It is not a lobby that supports this law.” Philippe Cordonier, who leads Swissmem in Romandie, has made a related argument: an industry that loses the ability to export also loses the ability to supply high-quality equipment to the Swiss army, which he describes as short of both money and materiel.
Jobs, and the line the bill will not cross
The risk Gerber wants voters to picture is a departure, not a slogan. He said some companies have already announced that they will leave Switzerland, and that subcontractors would follow. He pointed to the drone industry around Lake Geneva, close to EPFL, as a sector that is growing and that could take engineers’ jobs and apprenticeship places with it. A no on 29 November, in this telling, is not a vote that keeps a factory where it is. It is a vote that leaves the export permit as the obstacle.
The limit that does not move is Ukraine. Neutrality law still bars a direct sale of Swiss arms into that war, and the revision RTS described on Wednesday does not lift that bar. Opponents of the change, who collected the signatures for the referendum, argue that easing re-export rules and creating a partner list would raise the chance that Swiss weapons reach a conflict by another route, and that a bill which still refuses Ukraine does not answer the war that forced the argument. Both of those claims will be on the ballot paper in the form of a yes or a no. They are not settled by a morning interview.
What the 29 November question is asking
The question in front of voters is whether partner states may keep buying Swiss war materiel when they are themselves at war, and whether Bern should loosen its grip on what those buyers do with it afterwards. It is not a question about arming Ukraine directly. Gerber’s survival claim stands or falls on a narrower fact: whether firms that sell mostly to European and NATO customers can live with a law that cuts those customers off the moment they are attacked. The industry says they cannot. The referendum committee says the cost of agreeing is a hole in the rules that were tightened in 2022 for a reason.
Households will have the text, not only the interview. The useful reading, between now and 29 November, is to separate three things the morning programmes tend to fold together. A direct export to Ukraine stays banned. A sale to a listed partner that is itself at war is what the revision would allow. A later transfer by that partner to someone else is the non-re-export rule the bill would soften. A yes accepts the second and loosens the third. A no leaves the 2022 prohibition where it is. Read the question that way before the envelope goes back. The jobs argument is a reason to vote. It is not a substitute for the text.