Voters in Zurich reject pay rise for local politicians

Despite centre-left parties voting in favour of the idea, Zurich residents don't want higher wages for their local representatives. Keystone-SDA

Local parliamentarians in Zurich will not receive a pay hike after 53.2% of voters in the city came out against the plan on Sunday.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

A total of 45,350 Zurich residents voted against the pay rise, while 39,881 were in favor. The turnout was 36.7%.

With the new compensation ordinance, parliamentarians wanted to increase their salary from an average of CHF16,000 to CHF28,000 ($17,588 to $30,779) per year. Employer contributions would have been added to this amount, as local politicians would have been part of a pension fund in future.

A majority of parliamentarians felt that an increase was overdue. Since the last adjustment in 1998, the amount of work done in the local parliament has risen significantly, they said.

The new ordinance stipulated that the 125 members of parliament would have received a basic lump sum of CHF 1,000 per month instead of the monthly expense allowance of CHF 260. In addition, they would have been compensated CHF 1.20 for every minute of council meeting they attended.

+ Solothurn voters reject minimum wage of CHF23 per hour

The bill was put to the electorate because the Social Democrats, the Greens, the Liberal Greens, the Centre Party and the Alternative Left Party – all of whom voted in favour of the increase in the local parliament – jointly launched a parliamentary referendum. They wanted to let the population make the final call – but they didn’t do this entirely voluntarily; the right-wing Swiss People’s Party had for its part threatened to launch a referendum against it.

Together with the Radical-Liberal Party, the People’s Party came out against the pay rise. According to the former, the new wages were completely excessive; the latter, on the other hand, labelled them “shameless and indecent”. This pay rise was also a threat to the militia system because it was a step towards a professional parliament, they argued.

Adapted from German by DeepL/dos

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].