25 Nov 2018; DW:Swiss voters have weighed in on a controversial set of measures including spying and cow horns, as well as a judicial independence issue close to the famously neutral country's heart.
Swiss voters headed to the polls Sunday on a set of referenda including a proposed constitutional amendment to preserve cow horns headed by a livestock farmer inspired by talking to his herd of cattle.
Switzerland's direct democracy system allows voters to cast ballots on national issues four times a year. Sunday's referendum included two additional issues: controversial legal revisions that clarify whether insurance companies are allowed to secretly monitor suspected welfare cheats, as well as a proposal that would give the Swiss judiciary precedence over international agreements.
The "Swiss Law First" measure, backed by rightwing groups, called for domestic law to be placed above international law, a move that opponents claim would damage the neutral country's global standing.
Safeguarding cows
Ahead of the referendum, much of the public attention had been focused on an unusual grassroots campaign that began with few resources and no political support: Farmer Armin Capaul collected the over 100,000 signatures needed to force a national vote on protecting cows' horns.
The proposal outlined a constitutional amendment that would create incentives for farmers to let horns grow, rather than an outright ban on dehorning.
Capaul maintained that despite attention heaped on him after forcing the national vote, he is not the story. "It's the cow that's important, not me," the farmer, in his 70s, told the AFP news agency at his home in Perrefitte, a rural municipality in the heart of the Jura mountain range.
His cows gave him the idea to push for Sunday's referendum, said the Alpine herder. "I always talk to my cows in the barn. They asked me if I could do something for them, if I could help them keep their horns," he said.
Early results split
While polling earlier in November suggested the outcomes were too close to call, early projections on Sunday by Swiss broadcaster SRF suggested that voters would reject the measures on cow dehorning and judicial independence. Initial projections from Swiss dailies Tribune de Geneve and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, however, indicated that the measure on allowing insurance companies to spy on their insured would pass.
Sunday's vote brought to a head years of publicly debate on the issue: Insurers in the wealthy Alpine nation had long spied on customers suspected of making false claims, but the practice was halted in 2016 following a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights ruling.
The Swiss government, however, insisted that such surveillance was necessary to curb insurance fraud and to turn keep costs low for all. Following the European court's repudiation, Bern updated its legislation in a bid to restore surveillance powers to insurers.
Opponents of the revised surveillance law then mobilized enough supporters under the country's to force a referendum. An estimated 64.7 percent of voters ultimately backed the government on that topic.
"What the Swiss wanted to show was that the social safety net is important, but that [for it to work] we all have to be absolutely responsible," Benjamin Roduit of the center-right Christian Democratic Party told Swiss public broadcaster RTS.
