{"id":30800,"date":"2026-03-12T15:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T15:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/30800\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T15:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T15:44:09","slug":"swiss-senate-insists-on-counter-proposal-to-neutrality-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/30800\/","title":{"rendered":"Swiss Senate insists on counter-proposal to neutrality initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>    <img src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/641b67d613778e2a5b602b4d4f2a2776e88831bf-91086523.jpg\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1050\" alt=\"Council of States insists on counter-proposal to neutrality initiative\" loading=\"eager\" decoding=\"sync\" fetchpriority=\"high\"\/><\/p>\n<p>                Council of States insists on counter-proposal to neutrality initiative            <\/p>\n<p>            Keystone-SDA        <\/p>\n<p>        The Swiss Senate wants to continue to enshrine neutrality in the Constitution. On Thursday, it insisted on a counter-proposal to the neutrality initiative. In doing so, it opposed the House of Representatives and the federal government.\n<\/p>\n<p>            Listen to the article        <\/p>\n<p>            Listening the article        <\/p>\n<p>                Toggle language selector            <\/p>\n<p>                            English (US)                        <\/p>\n<p>                            English (British)                        <\/p>\n<p>            Generated with artificial intelligence.        <\/p>\n<p>        This content was published on    <\/p>\n<p>        March 12, 2026 &#8211; 15:49\n<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/about-us\/swissinfo-ch-newsletter_newsletter-subscription\/42152624\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The small chamber reached its decision by a narrow margin of 21 votes to 21 with one abstention and a casting vote by the President of the Senate, Stefan Engler from the Centre party. It thus followed a minority of the pre-advisory committee from the ranks of the Swiss People\u2019s Party and the Centre.<\/p>\n<p>It therefore remains unclear whether the neutrality initiative will be put to a vote by the people and the cantons with or without a direct counter-proposal. Last week, the House spoke out against a counter-proposal, and the government is of the same opinion.<\/p>\n<p>\n    More<\/p>\n<p>    <img src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/540968120_highres.jpg\" width=\"1300\" height=\"867\" alt=\"Neutrality as a compass: in which direction should it point?\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" fetchpriority=\"auto\"\/><\/p>\n<p>        More    <\/p>\n<p>        Neutrality\n        <\/p>\n<p>        How the neutrality initiative could affect Swiss policy    <\/p>\n<p class=\"teaser-wide-card__excerpt\">\n<p>                        This content was published on                    <\/p>\n<p>                        Nov 18, 2025                    <\/p>\n<p>                The neutrality initiative seeks to incorporate a strict interpretation of Swiss neutrality in the federal constitution. What would this mean for Switzerland\u2019s foreign and security policy?            <\/p>\n<p>    <a class=\"teaser-wide-card__link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/neutrality\/how-the-neutrality-initiative-could-affect-swiss-policy\/90344837\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><\/p>\n<p>            Read more: How the neutrality initiative could affect Swiss policy<br \/>\n    <\/a><\/p>\n<p>The initiative by Pro Switzerland and Swiss People\u2019s Party proponents calls for \u201cperpetual and armed\u201d neutrality and a broad ban on sanctions to be written into the Constitution.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The Senate must now consider the matter again. If it does not vote in favour of the counter-proposal a second time, it will be off the table.<\/p>\n<p>The Senate rejected the initiative last summer because, although it wanted to enshrine permanent and armed neutrality in the Constitution, it did not want to restrict the possibilities for sanctions. Accordingly, it adopted an alternative article on neutrality as a direct counter-proposal. <\/p>\n<p>Swiss citizens are expected to vote on the neutrality initiative in 2026.<\/p>\n<p>Translated from German by AI\/jdp<\/p>\n<p>                How we work            <\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/swiss-politics\/council-of-states-insists-on-counter-proposal-to-neutrality-initiative\/mailto:english@swissinfo.ch\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">english@swissinfo.ch<\/a><\/p>\n<p>        Articles in this story    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Council of States insists on counter-proposal to neutrality initiative Keystone-SDA The Swiss Senate wants to continue to enshrine&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[101,11844,326,100,69,103,102,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-30800","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-switzerland","8":"tag-article","9":"tag-beat-neutrality","10":"tag-beat-swiss-politics","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-politics","13":"tag-production-type-deepl-autotranslation","14":"tag-sda-ready-to-publish","15":"tag-switzerland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116216979168136279","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}