A constitutional amendment that would sharply limit Switzerland's cooperation with military and defense alliances and its participation in independent international sanctions is set to fail in a national referendum, projections showed.
An exit poll by public broadcaster SRG and polling firm GFS Bern, released immediately after the vote on the 27th, projected that 71% of voters opposed the measure, Reuters reported.
The referendum centered on writing permanent, military neutrality into the constitution, which would tightly restrict the government's discretion to interpret and apply neutrality flexibly depending on circumstances.
Had the amendment passed, independent government sanctions imposed over armed conflicts would have been banned outright unless backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution. Cooperation with military and defense alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would also have been limited to cases in which Switzerland itself came under attack. The effect would have been to lock in the country's permanent neutrality in a far more closed form than at present.
Switzerland has been internationally recognized as a neutral state since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The constitution, however, contains no provision on how the government should put that neutrality into practice. Successive governments have therefore interpreted it flexibly in line with shifts in the international environment, staying out of NATO and the European Union while taking limited part in NATO's Partnership for Peace and international peacekeeping missions.
The right-wing Swiss People's Party, which backed the amendment, has argued that joining sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine has undermined the country's traditional neutrality, campaigning under the slogan "against war, for neutrality."
Since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022, the Swiss government has adopted most of the 20 rounds of EU sanctions packages against Russia. That marked a shift from 2014, when Switzerland did not join sanctions over Russia's annexation of Crimea. The 2022 shift drew criticism that the country had effectively sided with Ukraine and abandoned its principle of neutrality.
The federal government and most political parties, by contrast, campaigned strongly against the amendment. Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis said in a recent television debate that neutrality had always been applied with a degree of flexibility, stressing that neutrality does not mean indifference.
Commenting on the exit poll, Green Party lawmaker Sibel Arslan said voters had seen through the Swiss People's Party's intentions, describing the proposal as an attempt to shirk responsibility even as international law was being violated and to isolate Switzerland from the international community.
Polls taken before the vote had also pointed to majority opposition, with an SRG and GFS Bern survey showing 34% in favor and 63% against. Fabio Wasserfallen, a professor of European politics at the University of Bern, told Reuters that the result indicated Swiss voters support neutrality itself but also endorse the current government's flexible approach to applying it.
