BERN. A National Council committee wants binding sovereignty tests on the software, hardware and cloud services the Confederation buys. The Economic Affairs and Taxation Committee approved the motion on Tuesday by 16 votes to 5, with 3 abstentions. The text does not reserve the contracts for Swiss firms. It says public buying should carry requirements that can be checked and measured, and that those requirements should tighten as the data gets more sensitive.
The sponsor is Sophie Michaud Gigon, a Green from Vaud. The title is plain: strengthening digital sovereignty through binding rules for public procurement. The motion states that Switzerland needs to be more autonomous in its critical activities and to keep full access to information technology at all times. Behind the sentence is a purchasing budget the committee put at CHF 1.7 billion a year, a flow that today runs in large part to American suppliers.
A preference, not a closed shop
What might have sounded improbable a few years ago is now a committee text. Artificial intelligence systems, computers and cloud contracts would all sit inside it. A blanket rule that every franc must go to a domestic vendor is not what passed. The graduated test is. A payroll system and a classified network would not be judged by the same standard. The point, as drafted, is that the state should be able to show how it keeps control of the more sensitive end, including if a foreign supplier changes its terms, its ownership or its government’s rules.
That is the taboo the debate has been walking up to. Swiss procurement law is built to treat bidders equally and to avoid industrial policy by another name. A sovereignty test is industrial policy, or it is security policy, depending on who is speaking. The committee’s margin suggests the security reading is currently winning, at least in this room. Sixteen to five is not a tentative ask for a report. It is an instruction to write rules.
Why this week
The committee sat on Monday and Tuesday. The vote landed in public on Friday morning. It sits in a wider argument about who holds Swiss data. The army has already turned Palantir away five times over fears for its data. A procurement motion is the civilian version of the same anxiety: not a ban on foreign technology, and not a pretence that Switzerland will build every system itself, but a refusal to sign contracts that cannot be unwound.
The motion still has to clear the National Council, and a committee vote is not a statute. What it changes today is the assumption that price and compliance are the only tests a federal IT contract has to pass. If the plenary follows the committee, vendors will have to show not only what the system costs, but who can still open it when the politics around it change.