DPA/AFP/Basel

A big majority of Swiss voters has rejected drastic limits on immigration that would have further damaged the country’s relations with the European Union.
However, the government still faces headwinds from Brussels on its plan to cap immigration from the bloc, which is based on a similar referendum that was successful in February, Justice and Police Minister Simonetta Sommaruga stressed.
Yesterday’s final result showed that 74.1% of those participating in the referendum voted “no” on reducing net immigration to fewer than 17,000 people a year, from more than 80,000 last year.
Just under half of eligible Swiss voters cast their ballots in yesterday’s vote, which is average in the country where the people are called to the polls every three months to voice their opinions on a seemingly endless range of issues as part of the country’s famous direct democratic system.
The conservative ecological movement Ecopop had launched the referendum to limit the annual influx of foreigners to 0.2% of the population, which currently stands at 8.2mn.
Ecopop argued that the Swiss landscape would be destroyed by urban sprawl and society would become overburdened unless immigration was curbed.
“People realised that the environmental problems that Ecopop wanted to solve cannot be solved with this initiative,” Sommaruga said.
It was the second referendum on this topic since February, when a narrow majority voted for introducing flexible limits and quotas for all foreigners including EU citizens, and for the preferential treatment of Swiss job seekers.
Since then, the Swiss government has been struggling to come up with a policy that satisfies voters and Brussels at the same time.
“The EU is not prepared to discuss one of its four fundamental freedoms, namely quotas, limits and prioritisation of Swiss nationals as they relate to the freedom of movement,” Sommaruga said.
The rejected Ecopop initiative would not allow the government to soften its stance towards Brussels, because the separate popular vote from February was still valid and had to be implemented, she said.
The government and businesses had warned that the Ecopop plan would put Switzerland’s access to the EU internal market at risk.
“The radical initiative would have massively hurt conditions for the Swiss economy in the coming years,” the Swiss business federation Economiesuisse said yesterday.
“What I’m worried about is a civilisation collapse,” Philippe Roch of the Ecopop committee told public broadcaster RTS after the results became clear.
“But clearly this text did not convince voters,” he acknowledged.
As it became clear that voters had massively rejected the initiative, sarcastic tweets flourished carrying the hashtag #Ecoflop.
Besides the migration vote, two other protectionist referenda also fell through yesterday.
The so-called Gold Initiative was rejected by 77.3% of voters.
The policy, proposed by some politicians of the far-right Swiss People’s Party, would have forced the central bank to triple its gold reserves to 20% of its assets and to stop storing gold abroad, as a way to protect the Swiss franc against foreign currency fluctuation.
The government had warned that the large gold share among the assets would make it more difficult for the central bank to react to future financial crises.
“Apparently, the people also share the opinion that gold has already lost its central role in monetary policy,” Finance Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said yesterday.
In the third referendum, 59.2% of voters said “no” to scrapping attractive tax rates for foreigners who live but do not work in Switzerland, which are lower than for Swiss citizens.
Communities had opposed the idea, fearing a drop in tax income from wealthy billionaires.
“People can count,” Christian Luescher, a parliamentarian from Geneva for the Liberal Party told RTS as the results came in.
He pointed out that Geneva, where most beneficiaries of the current system live, risked losing hundreds of millions of Swiss francs in tax revenue alone if the wealthy residents left.
However, the left-wing initiators of the vote pointed out that the vote result ran counter to international efforts to root out tax evasion.
“This discussion will continue,” Social Democratic Party chief Christian Levrat said.