BERN. When the Council of States opens its three day debate on the Bilaterals III package on 28 September, the substance will be the least controversial thing in the room. The foreign affairs committee backed the treaties by 9 votes to 3 on 4 September, and broad support in the chamber is not in doubt. The fight that will define the autumn is procedural: what kind of referendum the package must survive before it can live.
The distinction sounds technical and is anything but. Under an optional referendum, opponents would need 50,000 signatures to force a nationwide vote, and a simple majority of voters to sink the package. Under a mandatory referendum, the treaties would need a double majority: a majority of voters nationwide and a majority of the cantons, the Ständemehr that has decided every great European question since 1992.
That year hangs over everything. The vote on the European Economic Area failed on the cantons, not on the people, and the memory has organised Swiss EU politics ever since. Several members of the Council of States, the chamber of the cantons, now argue that a package this far reaching must carry the same constitutional rank, and the same double lock, as accession itself.
The government sees it differently. Bern negotiated Bilaterals III as a stabilisation of existing market access, not a new step toward membership, and wants the ordinary optional referendum that applies to treaties of limited scope. A mandatory referendum, officials warn privately, would hand a blocking minority of small, sceptical cantons a veto over the country’s most important trading relationship.
What is actually in the package
The chamber will take the stabilisation section first: the five existing market agreements, updated with a mechanism for the dynamic adoption of EU law, flanked by Swiss safeguards on wages and a protective clause if immigration runs too high. New agreements on food safety and health follow. The planned electricity agreement, the piece the energy sector wants most, is not ready and will not be debated.
Party arithmetic points to a long night. The People’s Party opposes the package outright and demands the mandatory referendum, calculating that the cantons are its best chance of killing the treaties for good. The centre and the left favour the optional route. The business lobby is split between exporters, who want the fastest possible ratification, and domestic industries wary of dynamic legal adoption.
Hanging over the debate is the Kompass initiative, the proposal to subject every significant treaty adjustment to an automatic vote, which Bern has urged voters to reject. If the chamber now writes a mandatory referendum into the EU package, the initiative’s backers will claim vindication; if it chooses the optional route, they will claim contempt for the voter. There is no version of the decision that ends the argument.
What happens next
The Council of States debates from 28 September, with a night sitting reserved if needed. The National Council follows in the winter session. If the optional route prevails, the signature period runs into the spring, and a nationwide vote in 2027 is the earliest realistic date. Brussels, which must also ratify, has asked Bern for one thing above all: legal certainty about how and when Switzerland decides.
The treaty debate will be loud, and much of it will be theatre. The clause that decides the package’s fate fits in a single sentence of the accompanying decree. Watch that sentence. Everything else is commentary.