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 the event, 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.

Under pressure from the unions, the SP, and the Greens, the centre-right parties and employers’ organisations also reluctantly agreed to strengthen wage protection (“Lohnschutz”) — meaning that wages that are due are actually paid. As is well known, being in the right and getting justice are not the same thing, particularly in the workplace. Swiss employers’ associations and centre-right parties accepted these social measures despite their neoliberal convictions, because they understood that they could hardly win popular referendums on closer ties with the EU without support from the left.

Thanks to those social flanking measures, bipartite commissions comprising the social partners (in sectors with generally binding collective agreements) or tripartite commissions comprising the cantons, unions, and employers’ associations (in sectors without generally binding agreements) now monitor the payroll records of Swiss and foreign companies to prevent social dumping. In 2025 alone, 38,500 companies were inspected. The collective-bargaining commissions found wage dumping in 24 per cent of companies posting workers in sectors with universally binding collective agreements. The cantonal commissions found wage irregularities in 21 per cent of foreign companies and in 10 per cent of Swiss firms. It is also worth noting that the Swiss flanking measures rest on a corporatist rather than liberal, court-based equal-pay enforcement regime for domestic and posted workers, relying on contractual penalties, exclusion from public contracts, and similar sanctions instead of labour-court procedures. As a result, the Swiss bipartite and tripartite commissions have been able to secure back pay for tens of thousands of workers without forcing them to take legal action against their employers. That matters, because companies often respond to workers who assert their rights in court by dismissing them in retaliation — a pattern that has been documented even in social-democratic countries, as Tiago Matos’s study of a pyrrhic victory of posted workers in Norway shows.

The accompanying measures to enforce the principle of “equal pay for equal work in the same place” do not merely benefit hundreds of thousands of workers. They also explain why the SVP has not succeeded in preventing or abolishing the right to the free movement of persons — neither in the vote on the SVP initiative on 14 June 2026 nor before, as the results of earlier Swiss votes on free movement with the EU make clear:

• 21 May 2000 (Bilateral EU-Switzerland Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons, EU-15): yes vote, 55 per cent.
• 25 September 2005 (extension to the EU-10): yes vote, 56 per cent.
• 8 February 2009 (extension to Bulgaria and Romania): yes vote, 60 per cent.
• 27 September 2020 (SVP initiative on the termination of the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons with the EU): no vote, 62 per cent.

On 9 February 2014, 50.3 per cent of the Swiss population voted in favour of an SVP initiative “Against Mass Immigration”. That outcome, however, did not lead to the termination of the free-movement agreement, but merely to an obligation on Swiss employers to advertise vacant posts first at local job centres before advertising them abroad.

During the referendum campaign in June 2026, even the SVP implicitly acknowledged the success of the flanking measures against social dumping. That is why the right-wing populist party focused its xenophobic campaign on other issues — the alleged “overcrowding” (Dichtestress) caused by higher passenger numbers on public transport, and the threats to “sustainability” said to be posed by the urbanisation of Switzerland. Yet even with this populist campaign, which celebrated the Switzerland depicted in Johanna Spyri’s romantic children’s novel Heidi, the SVP suffered a crushing defeat on 14 June, particularly in the cities, but also in many rural areas.

After one referendum, of course, another is never far behind in Swiss direct democracy. The Swiss population will soon vote on a third package of bilateral agreements with the EU, designed to deepen the country’s ties with the bloc. After years of conflict and negotiation, Swiss and European trade unions have succeeded in convincing the European Commission and the Swiss government of the crucial importance of Swiss social flanking measures. The outcome of the forthcoming vote nevertheless remains uncertain, as several centre-right MPs and employers feel that one of the additional social flanking measures proposed by the Swiss government to secure workers’ support goes too far. They object, in particular, to the proposal to give full effect to the provisions of ILO Convention No. 98 on the right to organise and to collective bargaining — and, more specifically, to its protection of elected workers’ representatives against unjust dismissal.