Swiss voters on Sunday decisively rejected a call to require women to do national service in the military, civil protection teams or other forms, as all men must do already.
Official results. with counting still ongoing in some areas after a referendum, showed that more than half of Switzerland’s cantons, or states, had rejected the “citizen service initiative” by wide margins. That meant it was defeated, because proposals need a majority of both voters and cantons to pass.
Voters also heavily rejected a separate proposal to impose a new national tax on individual donations or inheritances of more than 50 million francs ($62 million), with the revenues to be used to fight the impact of climate change and help Switzerland meet its ambitions to have net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
What is not well enough reprensented in this post is that the Service Citoyen was not only about makimg women do a mandatory service. It was to transform the outdated and regressive mandatory service for men into a more general service to the collective that treated security not as a entirely militaristic issue but as a wholistic one.
Now parliament will interpret this as a mandate to cull the existing useful civil service and force every men (and potentially women too) into the military.
There shouldn’t be mandatory military service at all
With this parliament the military will stay and grow and become more and more unavoidable. Service citoyen would have countered that…
That’s an option I would accept too.
Tell that to Ukraine.
I thought everyone had to serve. Sad.
As an American, I have no room at all to judge this decision. But
proposals need a majority of both voters and cantons to pass.
That sounds amazing. Let’s do that, please.
I mean, straight popular vote would probably be better. But this could really do what the Electoral College stans say that it was made to do, without doing what it actually does.
That sounds amazing.
It sounds arbitrary and heavily weighted to favor the smaller cantons. Same problem we have with the US Senate and the filibuster. Representatives for a meager 30M voters can obstruct policy championed by the other 300M
Anything even slightly better than the idiocy we have seems amazing to me, apparently
The takes on here are wild as a Swiss dude.
Hint: Mandatory service is a problem.
