BRUSSELS. The Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament approved the Switzerland EU treaty package on Thursday by a large majority, passing the item in minutes and without discussion. The committee also adopted an accompanying resolution stating that the agreements were negotiated and concluded as a balanced whole.
The vote in Brussels is a recommendation to the full parliament, not ratification itself. No date has been set for a plenary vote, and the European side must still complete its own legal scrutiny. For Swiss diplomats, however, the signal is clear: the institutional machinery in Brussels is moving, and the window in which Bern can delay without cost is narrowing.
The package, known as Bilaterals III, was negotiated in 2024 after years of friction over market access, institutional cooperation and the dynamic adoption of EU law. It stabilises five existing agreements and adds new texts on electricity, health and food safety. Switzerland cannot amend a word of what its negotiators signed; parliament in Bern can only approve, reject, or attach domestic conditions to implementation.
Thursday’s committee vote follows backing from the Council of States foreign affairs committee and lands seventeen days before the 27 September neutrality referendum, a vote Brussels watches as a mood check on Swiss openness to the outside world. The three day Senate debate on the package itself opens on 28 September.
The accompanying resolution matters as much as the approval line. By describing the package as a balanced whole, the committee forecloses the European argument that individual agreements might be picked apart. That language mirrors Bern’s own insistence that the treaties are indivisible, and it gives rapporteurs in Strasbourg a text to defend when sceptical MEPs ask why Switzerland should receive market access without membership obligations.
Reaction in Bern was carefully positive. The foreign ministry called the vote an expected step and repeated that Switzerland’s ratification timetable depends on parliament, not on Brussels alone. Officials in the economics department noted that exporters still face uncertainty on electricity market access until the full package is in force on both sides.
The procedural fight inside Switzerland remains unresolved. The optional versus mandatory referendum question may decide whether the package survives a popular vote at all. A mandatory referendum would require a double majority of voters and cantons; an optional referendum would need only a simple national majority if opponents gather 50,000 signatures.
Industry groups welcomed the Brussels vote as confirmation that the economic case for the package is understood abroad. The People’s Party replied that European approval does not bind Swiss voters, and that the speed of Thursday’s committee passage proves how little scrutiny the treaties received in Brussels.
Geneva-based diplomats offered a cooler reading. Several noted that European Parliament elections and commission turnover could still shift the calendar, and that Switzerland’s domestic debate will run into 2027 regardless of how quickly AFET moved. Ratification, they said, is a relay race in which both runners must finish.
For now, the baton is in Bern. Brussels has moved from negotiation to ratification. Switzerland is still deciding not only whether to sign, but how its people will be asked. Thursday’s vote in Brussels removed one uncertainty abroad. The larger ones remain at home.