Swiss voters massively reject inheritance tax, civic duty proposals

For the backers of a proposed national tax on large inheritances, the defeat was heftier than expected. Keystone / Alessandro Della Valle

Swiss citizens have overwhelmingly voted against both a proposal for a new tax on big inheritances and a call for all citizens to perform civic duty, final results of Sunday’s poll show.

Some 84.1% of voters said no to the civic duty proposal, while 78.3% rejected the inheritance tax initiative. Voter turnout on Sunday was 43%. All cantons voted firmly against the two initiatives.

The proposal for a system of mandatory civic duty to be performed by all citizens suffered a particularly stinging defeat. Just six weeks ago some 48% of those polled by research institute gfs.bern said they would support the proposal. This figure then dipped to 32% ten days before Sunday’s vote.

‘The idea of civic duty is not dead’

“It’s never over – the battle continues,” Noémie Roten, member of the civic duty initiative committee, told Swiss public television RTS. “We’re proud to have brought important topics” to the national debate, she added, citing themes of gender equality, civic responsibility and national security raised by the proposal.

The “For a committed Switzerland” initiative had called for a reform of the existing system of compulsory service, which is limited to men serving in the army, civil defence or civilian service. The initiative wanted to extend this system to women, who can currently join voluntarily, and to include a wider choice of tasks that benefit society, such as protecting the environment and assisting vulnerable people. Civic duty would have been voluntary for Swiss citizens living abroad, as is now the case for military service.

Roten said the idea of civic duty for all may just be ahead of its time.

“Major societal projects often need several attempts at the ballot box,” she said, citing the women’s right to vote in Switzerland as an example. “So the idea of civic duty is not dead.”

Support for the proposal clearly eroded in the final weeks of the campaign, said Lukas Golder of gfs.bern. Some members of the centrist Liberal Green Party and centre-right Radical-Liberals initially supported the initiative, “but over time, weaknesses became increasingly apparent,” and overall support collapsed, Golder told Swiss public television SRF.

Those in favour of the initiative had claimed the concept would promote gender equality, along with social cohesion and civic engagement. But the equality argument ultimately failed to convince voters, who were also swayed by concerns over the administrative costs involved.

‘Cost for nothing’

“It wasn’t fear of the new – it would have been a huge cost for nothing,” senator Andrea Gmür of the Centre Party told SRF. Gmür argued the initiative would not have represented progress on equality, as women already shoulder much of the care work in society. “This civic duty would have only raised more questions than it answered,” she said.

For women in Switzerland, military service is currently voluntary; authorities are keen to boost numbers. Keystone / Gaetan Bally

The Group for a Switzerland Without an Army also welcomed the result and said it would continue its fight against attempts by the army to boost its numbers. Supporters of the initiative had claimed civic duty would guarantee enough forces for civil defence and the army, which expects to face a shortage of trained personnel by 2029.

Despite the result, the initiative committee plans to forge ahead with its appeal against the official voting documents the Swiss government sent to voters. The committee had requested corrections to information on the civic duty initiative. “In our opinion,” Roten said, “the citizens of this country did not have objective, complete, transparent and proportionate information to allow them to form an undistorted opinion.”

Inheritance tax: the left against the rest

For the backers of a proposed national tax on large inheritances, the defeat was also heftier than expected: the rejection by 78.3% of voters is steeper than opinion polls predicted, and also higher than the 71% who said no to a similar initiative ten years ago. As was the case a decade ago, not a single canton accepted the proposal on Sunday.

The idea, for a 50% levy on bequests above a tax-free CHF50 million ($61.8 million), was brought by the Young Socialists (JUSO) party, who took aim both at rising wealth inequality and the role of the super-rich in contributing to climate change. Had the initiative passed, the proceeds from the levy would have gone towards climate projects.

However, the left-wing plan was strongly opposed by the government, most political parties, and a well-funded campaign which warned of an exodus of rich taxpayers and problems for family businesses in coming up with the capital to pay the levy.

Economic concerns

Benjamin Mühlemann, the co-leader of the Radical-Liberals, said on Sunday that the campaign had shown voters that the initiative would have meant a “destruction of our economy and prosperity”, in addition to widespread job losses.

Meanwhile, even if wealth inequality has been growing in Switzerland, overall prosperity has been rising for all income groups in the country, Mühlemann told SRF.

Monika Rühl from the economiesuisse business federation added the result was a signal in favour of “strong family firms” and that – after a similar failed 2015 initiative – it should be clear now that “Swiss voters don’t want a national-level inheritance tax”.

>> How Switzerland’s current inheritance taxes – levied at the cantonal and local level – compare internationally:

‘Good ideas take time’

For their part, backers of the initiative admitted the outcome wasn’t a surprise. In a statement on Sunday, JUSO claimed that the big-budget opposition campaign had used “smear” tactics to turn attention away from the substance of the proposal, including the climate issue. JUSO president Mirjam Hostetmann previously criticised media appearances by wealthy individuals, threatening to move abroad to avoid the tax, as “a campaign of fear”.

Cédric Wermuth, co-president of the Social Democrats, told SRF that “good ideas take time”, and that combating inequality remains a topic of concern for the population amid rising costs for things like healthcare insurance. This particular way of going about it was not popular, but “we’ll come up with a better one”, he said.

Indeed, Sunday’s vote wasn’t the first time in recent years that Swiss voters have had a say on taxing the rich. A 2021 initiative to tax capital gains and a previous attempt in 2015 to introduce a national inheritance tax also failed – again, largely because of fears about job losses and disruptions to business.

Edited by Reto Gysi von Wartburg/dos