Switzerland Votes Down a Xenophobic Initiative — Thanks to the Unions!

On 14 June 2026, Swiss voters went to the polls on a xenophobic popular initiative bearing the title “No to a Switzerland with 10 million! (Sustainability Initiative)”. In this guest post, Roland Erne argues that 55 per cent of voters rejected the constitutional initiative put forward by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), partly thanks to a trade-union campaign spanning several decades.

 

Had the SVP’s initiative passed, the consequences would have been dramatic. It would have obliged the authorities to suspend the right to asylum and the right to family reunification once a fixed population ceiling of 9.5 million people — a figure likely to be reached within a few years — was exceeded. From the moment that ceiling was breached, persons granted provisional admission would also have lost any prospect of a residence or settlement permit, Swiss citizenship, or any other right of residence.

 

Because the right to family reunification is also enshrined in the 21 June 1999 Agreement between the Swiss Confederation and the European Union on the free movement of persons, the Swiss government argued that adopting the SVP initiative would have led to the termination of all bilateral agreements between Switzerland and the EU. For that reason, the initiative was also opposed by liberal and centrist parties, as well as by business associations, who dubbed it the “chaos initiative”. The decisive factor, however, was the large-scale mobilisation against the initiative by the trade unions, the left-wing Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SP), and the Greens — independent organisations that collaborate closely with one another.

 

The rejection of the SVP initiative is the fruit of a decades-long union campaign that secured effective social accompanying measures in connection with Switzerland’s integration into the EU single market. These “flanking measures” meant that collective bargaining coverage in Switzerland rose — according to the OECD — by more than 20 per cent following the country’s integration into the EU single market, namely from 40.1 per cent in 2001 to 51.5 per cent in 2021. The numbers underscore that EU market integration and social progress can be reconciled, provided there is the political will to do so.

 

 

This post was first published on Social Europe, 13 July 2026.

 

Roland Erne is professor of European integration and employment relations, and principal investigator of the European Research Council project ‘Labour Politics & the EU's New Economic Governance Regime‘, in the School of Business and the Geary Institute for Public Policy, University College Dublin.