Swiss Abroad more open to sustainable economy

Keystone / Martial Trezzini

Most Swiss Abroad voters rejected the “environmental responsibility initiative” on Sunday, but without inflicting the same defeat on it as voters in Switzerland. Environmental issues often attract more support from the diaspora.

Sunday was a resounding defeat for the initiative on environmental responsibility, swept aside by almost 70% of the electorate and all 26 cantons.

An analysis of the vote by the Swiss Abroad reveals a slightly different picture, although its scope is limited by the fact that only 12 cantons provide separate statistics on the vote by their expat citizens.

Most Swiss Abroad also rejected the text, but to a much lesser extent: the percentage of “no” votes was 55%, 15 points lower than the figure for the country as a whole.

Details of how the Swiss Abroad voted in the cantons that provide this information reveal wide variations in some places, even if the “yes” vote remains in the minority everywhere.

An electorate that votes greener overall

Traditionally, the Swiss Abroad vote more in favour of the environment and more to the left than those living in Switzerland.

It’s true that last November’s vote on motorway extension was a notable exception to this “rule”, with the diaspora turning out more in favour than the population as a whole – to the surprise of experts.

However, in the previous vote in September, most Swiss Abroad supported the biodiversity initiative, although the text failed at national level. Martina Mousson, a political scientist at the gfs.bern research institute, spoke of a “pattern”.

Comparable differences had already been observed in previous ballots, notably on the Climate Act, the CO2 Act, the “For a pesticide-free Switzerland” initiative and the “For clean drinking water” initiative.

According to Mousson, the fact that expats vote more in favour of the environment is linked to “the demographics of this group, which is generally more left-wing, more concerned about the environment, has a higher level of education and tends to approach issues with a more global vision”.

At the time, she felt that the concrete content of the project had certainly had less influence than “the vision of principle that people have of ecology” – an analysis that is certainly equally applicable to Sunday’s vote on the global concept of planetary limits.

Lowest turnout in five years

Turnout was low: 38% of eligible voters nationwide participated, the lowest turnout for a federal referendum in the past five years, with the average being just under 50%.

This was also the case among the Swiss Abroad: 20% of eligible expatriates voted, compared with an average of 25% in recent referendums.

It has to be said that the campaign was not very lively and the media attention given to this vote was fairly low. For gfs.bern political scientist Cloé Jans, the fact that only one issue was put to the vote on Sunday – often there are three or four – helps to explain this. “A lot more people get involved when there are a lot of issues to vote on,” she notes in the analysis below:

The overall budgets invested in the campaign were modest: CHF680,000 ($750,000), a tenth of the sum spent on the November vote on the motorway projects.

Edited by Samuel Jaberg. Translated from German by DeepL/ts