BERN. Three weeks before Switzerland votes on writing a stricter neutrality into its constitution, the initiative is losing, and losing consistently. The first broadcaster poll put rejection at 54 per cent against 42 per cent in favour. A second survey, for the 20 Minuten and Tamedia titles, put it at 62 to 32. The campaigns have twenty days to prove the polls wrong, and both are behaving as if they might be.
The initiative, brought by the Pro Suisse association and led by former federal councillor Christoph Blocher, would define neutrality as perpetual and armed, bar Switzerland from joining economic sanctions not mandated by the United Nations, and end cooperation with NATO, including the partnership programmes that have anchored Swiss security policy for three decades.
Its supporters call this a return to first principles, the neutrality of 1815, undiluted by a world of hybrid threats. Posters with white doves have blanketed the country since August, and the Yes camp has declared CHF 3.84 million for the campaign, more than double the budget of its opponents. The Kremlin, under Swiss sanctions since 2022, has made its preference unmistakably clear.
That endorsement may be the initiative’s heaviest burden. Opponents have built their case on it: a proposal cheered in Moscow, they argue, is a proposal written for Moscow’s Europe, not Switzerland’s. The Yes campaign replies that peace has no guilty friends, and that a country which sanctions one belligerent has already chosen a side.
The argument has pulled in an unusual coalition. Twenty two organisations, including Amnesty International, Alliance Sud, Terre des Hommes, Public Eye and the Swiss Peace Council, launched a joint campaign against the initiative in Bern last week, warning it would damage both Swiss security and Swiss humanitarian credibility. Retired diplomats and senior officers have signed open letters on both sides, some in the same week’s newspapers.
Beneath the noise, the numbers have barely moved. Support holds at 86 per cent among People’s Party voters and trails among every other party’s electorate. The initiative wins a narrow majority in rural areas and loses towns and cities by nearly two to one. Voters over 65, the most reliable ballot returners, are the most critical of all. In French speaking Switzerland, where the campaign is loudest, support runs slightly higher than in the German speaking east, 43 to 41 per cent in the first poll, without approaching a majority.
The pollsters counsel the usual caution. gfs.bern, which surveyed 17,212 voters for the broadcaster in early August, notes that initiatives typically shed support as campaigns progress, which makes rejection the likely outcome but not a settled one. The undecided four per cent, courted by every poster between here and the border, will not decide the result alone. They will decide the margin, and the margin is how the losing side will measure the country’s mood.
On the same ballot, the food security initiative is faring no better. What began as September’s close race now shows rejection at around 65 per cent in the second survey, with farmers’ organisations split between the romance of self sufficiency and the arithmetic of a mandated production target.
The Federal Council opposes both proposals and has said so with unusual bluntness, warning that the neutrality text would create legal uncertainty and weaken the very independence it claims to defend. Parliament agrees, across almost all party lines. In Swiss direct democracy, that establishment wall is often the beginning of a campaign’s troubles with voters. This time, so far, it is holding.
Ballot papers are already in households, and postal votes are arriving at communal offices. What remains is the loudest fortnight: the final television debates, the last poster runs, the doorsteps. On 27 September, Switzerland answers a question it has spent two centuries not asking. All signs say the answer is no. The Yes camp has three weeks to make the signs liars.