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In future, the National Council should think about which laws can be scrapped.
KEYSTONE
Since the turn of the millennium, Switzerland's collection of laws has swollen by 60 percent - and now the middle-class National Councillors want to declare war on this with an annual "deletion week".
Spring is here - at least according to the astronomical definition. Outside, there is still dust on the barbecue, bicycles and garden furniture. But the big spring clean is still a long way off due to the snow and cold.
But the cleaning mania seems to have broken out in the Federal Palace of all places. However, it's not about fragrant carpets and steam-cleaned voting systems in the National Council chamber. It's about something that some citizens have long been annoyed about: bureaucracy.
Specifically, a group of parliamentarians wants to regularly muck out laws and ordinances. Once a year, parliament should ask itself: Which rules does Switzerland actually still need? And which ones are long outdated?
The idea did not come from Parliament itself, but from outside. Jürg Müller, Director of the pro-business and market-liberal think tank Avenir Suisse, suggested in an NZZ column in 2024 that Parliament should introduce an annual "deletion week": a session week in which old laws are deleted rather than new ones being passed.
His argument: between 2000 and 2020, the Swiss collection of laws grew from around 23,000 to over 37,000 pages - an increase of over 60 percent. More and more rules, more and more bureaucracy.
A cleaner wipes the tables and empties the ashtrays in the Federal Palace in Bern after the end of the session, taken in 1963.
KEYSTONE
It is thanks to Roger Golay that the proposal became more than just a column. The Geneva National Councillor of the Mouvement Citoyens Genevois - he is a member of the SVP parliamentary group - introduced the idea in 2025 as a parliamentary initiative. This is an instrument that parliamentarians can use to initiate a new law themselves without having to take the detour via the government.
Golay's reasoning: laws sometimes create clarity, but sometimes they just make everything more complicated, cumbersome and expensive. His solution: a new commission that examines every year which regulations could be simplified or deleted altogether - and makes concrete proposals to parliament.
The proposal should have a good chance. Almost a quarter of all members of the National Council have signed the motion, primarily from the SVP, FDP and the center. As it is a parliamentary initiative, Parliament can take matters into its own hands. All that would be needed is a small change to its own rules of procedure - in other words, to the rules of the game that Parliament sets itself.
