{"id":75023,"date":"2026-05-31T09:50:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T09:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/75023\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T09:50:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T09:50:12","slug":"swiss-parties-skeptical-about-vat-hike-for-army-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/75023\/","title":{"rendered":"Swiss parties skeptical about VAT hike for army spending"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>    <img src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/e3fe15629a9a14d62eb58b76b05edef5a49572b6-91502123.jpg\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1050\" alt=\"Many reservations about VAT increase for defence spending\" loading=\"eager\" decoding=\"sync\" fetchpriority=\"high\"\/><\/p>\n<p>                Hunting for funds: Swiss Defence Minister Martin Pfister.            <\/p>\n<p>            Keystone-SDA        <\/p>\n<p>        The government\u2019s proposed VAT increase to finance defence spending has been rather poorly received in a consultation process which ended on Saturday. Almost all political parties are critical of the idea.\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>        May 31, 2026 &#8211; 10:58\n<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/about-us\/swissinfo-ch-newsletter_newsletter-subscription\/42152624?utm_source=multiple&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_campaign=highlights-front_en&amp;utm_content=o&amp;utm_term=wpblock_teaser-card-carousel\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Only the Centre Party is unreservedly behind the government\u2019s plans to increase VAT by 0.8 percentage points for a limited period of ten years to finance army spending.<\/p>\n<p>The centre-right Radical-Liberal Party, for its part, is in favour of a fund to finance the army\u2019s defence spending; however, it rejects \u201cin no uncertain terms\u201d the idea of doing this by increasing VAT.<\/p>\n<p>\n    More<\/p>\n<p>    <img src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/41753615_highres.jpg\" width=\"1300\" height=\"932\" alt=\"As multifunctional as VAT: Swiss Army knife with 87 tools and 141 functions.\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" fetchpriority=\"auto\"\/><\/p>\n<p>        More    <\/p>\n<p>        Swiss Politics\n        <\/p>\n<p>        Value added tax: the Swiss government\u2019s all-purpose tool    <\/p>\n<p class=\"teaser-wide-card__excerpt\">\n<p>                        This content was published on                    <\/p>\n<p>                        Jan 28, 2026                    <\/p>\n<p>                Switzerland has the lowest VAT rate in Europe. Now the Swiss government wants to increase it to pay for national defence.            <\/p>\n<p>    <a class=\"teaser-wide-card__link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.swissinfo.ch\/eng\/swiss-politics\/value-added-tax-the-swiss-governments-all-purpose-tool\/90851111\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><\/p>\n<p>            Read more: Value added tax: the Swiss government\u2019s all-purpose tool<br \/>\n    <\/a><\/p>\n<p>The right-wing People\u2019s Party is also against the VAT increase and wants to reallocate funds instead, while the Liberal Greens want to make less money available. The Greens don\u2019t want any increase in the army budget at all.<\/p>\n<p>The left-wing Social Democrats are also against the VAT increase and are calling for other options.<\/p>\n<p>Adapted from German by AI\/dos<\/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\/various\/many-reservations-about-vat-increase-for-defence-spending\/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":"Hunting for funds: Swiss Defence Minister Martin Pfister. Keystone-SDA The government\u2019s proposed VAT increase to finance defence spending&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[101,301,312,9095,100,103,12863,41,17],"class_list":["post-75023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-article","tag-beat-foreign-affairs","tag-beat-various","tag-defence","tag-latest-news","tag-production-type-deepl-autotranslation","tag-state-budget-and-tax","tag-swiss","tag-switzerland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116668571601178462","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75023","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=75023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}