BERN. Three days before Switzerland votes, the campaign that is still visible has come loose from the election that is actually happening. Closing rallies for the neutrality initiative and the food security initiative are booked for Friday evening and Saturday morning. Posters stay up until the legal deadline. Committees will spend the weekend at markets from Schaffhausen to Sion. In the communal election office, the only room that counts, a large share of the vote is already in. Postal returns are running ahead of the June ballot in Zurich, Bern, Basel, Aargau and St Gallen.
What the last polls say
The numbers have not moved in a week, and they were already decisive. The final SRG trend poll, conducted by gfs.bern, puts the neutrality initiative at 63 per cent against and 34 per cent in favour, with 3 per cent undecided. Eighty three per cent of voters say their mind is made up. The food security initiative trails 64 to 33. A later YouGov barometer, published on 15 September, is harsher still: about 30 per cent yes and 63 per cent no on neutrality, and 29 to 65 on the food proposal. Turnout intention sits at 49 per cent, a little above the long run average of 47.4.
Only People’s Party voters still back the neutrality text clearly. Green Liberal voters reject it by the widest margin measured in the campaign. The swing that settled the race came among voters without a party home, who leant yes in August and now break toward no. The No committees credit one argument: writing a stricter, sanctions shy neutrality into the constitution would narrow the security cooperation Switzerland actually uses. The final SRG poll put that case 29 points ahead.
Christoph Blocher, the former federal councillor whose money sits behind the Yes campaign, has already said the vote is lost, and said he put another CHF 1.8 million into the closing days anyway, to keep the argument alive after the result. It is an expensive way to lose, and a familiar one. The initiative’s backers have treated the ballot as a platform as much as a verdict.
The other question on the same ballot
The food initiative’s fall is quieter and, in its way, steeper. It began the summer in a dead heat and has shed fourteen points of support in a month. Voters still like the aims, cleaner water and more food grown at home, and refuse the mechanism: a legal target of at least 70 per cent self sufficiency within ten years. The Farmers’ Union, the constituency the text claims to defend, campaigned against what it called a state mandated menu. The drought summer did not rescue the Yes. gfs.bern expects late deciders to break toward the status quo, as they usually do.
Sunday’s timetable is fixed. Polling stations close at noon. Communes may start counting postal ballots in the morning, and the first municipal results follow within the hour. The federal chancellery expects a reliable national picture by mid afternoon and final cantonal figures by evening. The grey envelopes already in the safes are why the picture will form quickly.
Then the week turns the page. On Monday the Council of States opens three days of debate on the EU treaty package, a file that becomes simpler if neutrality has just been rejected by a wide margin. The Yes committees will hold their post mortems before the posters come down. The No camp will claim a mandate for the government’s European course. Both will be reading one Sunday evening for different lessons. The rallies this weekend are a ritual the country performs whether or not anyone is still persuadable. The envelopes that decide it have been arriving for a month.