Most Swiss support country joining nuclear ban treaty

Majority supports Swiss accession to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Keystone-SDA

Around 70% of respondents to a survey are in favour of Switzerland joining the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, according to Demoscope.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

The survey published on Saturday shows that the issue also found a majority across the board, regardless of factors such as gender, age, education, employment status, region and type of settlement.

The same applied to party affiliation, with approval among voters of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party being the lowest at 51%. Among centre-right Radical-Liberal Party voters 68% were in favour, 78% for the Centre Party and 92% for the left-wing Social Democratic Party, Green Party and centrist Liberal Green Party.

A total of 1,007 people throughout Switzerland were interviewed for the survey in November. Demoscope conducted the survey on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

+ ‘It’s never been more urgent to eliminate nuclear weapons’

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) aims to outlaw nuclear weapons worldwide and achieve their complete abolition. Since it came into force in 2021, almost 100 countries have joined the UN General Assembly treaty; 74 of them have ratified the treaty. The official and unofficial nuclear powers and all NATO states have not yet signed the treaty.

Government sees no benefit

In Switzerland, meanwhile, the Swiss electorate is to decide whether to join the treaty. According to the Alliance for a Ban on Nuclear Weapons, it has collected over 135,000 signatures – enough for the popular initiative, as was reported in mid-December.

The background to this is that the government once again rejected the signing of the TPNW in March 2024. It considers Switzerland’s commitment to a world without nuclear weapons within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to be more effective.

+ Swiss government again declines to sign nuclear weapons treaty 

At the time, it stated that joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was not in Switzerland’s interests in the current international environment, in which a new war in Europe had once again brought security policy aspects to the fore.

The government had already rejected accession in 2018 and 2019. Furthermore, the government considers the treaty to have little impact because it is not recognised by the owners of nuclear weapons, but also by almost all Western and European countries.

Adapted from German by AI/ts

How we work 

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]