Service Citoyen brutally punished No municipality said yes - only two initiatives were more unsuccessful
The service-citoyen initiative failed miserably. In the history of referendums, however, there were two proposals that received even less support.
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- The service-citizen initiative was clearly rejected with 84.2 percent of votes against.
- In the past, only the GLP initiative "Energy instead of VAT" and the maternity protection initiative from 1984 have failed even more clearly.
- Despite broad political support in some cases, both received less than 16% of votes in favor.
On Sunday, a clear majority of Swiss voters rejected compulsory civil service for all men and women. According to provisional results, the service-citizen initiative failed with 84.2 percent of votes against. Conversely, this means: Only 15.8 percent voted yes.
A look at the archives shows that there have already been two proposals that were rejected even more clearly.
First place among the failures: GLP initiative (2015)
The Green Liberal Party suffered the clearest defeat in a federal referendum a good ten years ago. Its "Energy tax instead of VAT" initiative called for VAT to be replaced by an energy tax on non-renewable energy sources. It only received support from the Greens.
All other parties rejected the initiative. According to the Swissvotes voting database, the list included: BDP, CSP, CVP (now Die Mitte), EDU, EVP, FDP, FPS, KVP, Lega, MCG, PdA, SD, SP and SVP.
Although the Greens and Green Liberals together accounted for around 13.8 percent of the electorate at the time, the initiative only received just under eight percent of votes in favor. In absolute figures, only 175,405 people voted in favor - barely more than the 100,000 signatures required for a popular initiative to be passed. The main criticism was that the initiative wanted to radically restructure public finances: At CHF 22 billion, VAT was responsible for more than a third of all revenue. For many voters, replacing this revenue with another tax was too great a risk.
2nd place: Maternity protection initiative (1984)
The maternity protection initiative, which was voted on in December 1984, ranks second among the clearest defeats - ahead of the service-citoyen initiative. In addition to extended maternity leave, the proposal also provided for paid parental leave for mothers and fathers.
The initiative was supported by left-wing parties and organizations such as the SP, the then POCH (Progressive Organizations of Switzerland) and the Labour Party. Together they represented 26% of the electorate. However, they were not even able to convince these supporters. The initiative failed with only 15.7% of votes in favor.
One of the reasons why the women's organizations behind the proposal failed was that middle-class women also opposed the issue. In particular, they rejected the idea that fathers should also be entitled to paid parental leave. In their view, the mother belonged to the child.
