this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Comic Strips
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What i find sad is that almost no democracy has a sane initiative/referendum system. This is important as inhibitor for politicians lying or otherwise doing what they want.
Unfortunately, a lot of initiative / referendum systems are pretty insane. See California or Switzerland.
I'm partially familiar with the Swiss referendum system. In what way is it "pretty insane" ?
Their referendums have the force of law, but they passed a referendum that violated the terms of a treaty that had been carefully negotiated to allow them some of the benefits of the EU without actually joining it. It put quotas on immigration and residence permits, including from EU states, but their EU treaties forbid that, and if it had gone into effect it would have meant canceling all EU treaties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Swiss_immigration_initiative
The Swiss government had to, '[climb] down from the initial referendum proposals, adopting instead a "light national preference" to implement the referendum', which technically violated the terms of the referendum, but it was the only way to preserve Switzerland's treaties with the EU.
It's extremely likely that at least some of the people voting on the referendum didn't understand that it would cancel those treaties. The treaties are basically the reason that Switzerland is so rich. They have a lower individual tax rate than the rest of Europe, but they have treaties allowing people to move freely between the countries. That means that bankers, accountants, consultants, etc. from across Europe are housed in Switzerland where they pay low income tax, but are able to work freely throughout Europe. It's why the main European bases of the tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. are in Switzerland, drawing employees from all over Europe to the low-tax haven. So, even though Switzerland's tax rate is low, these are all very highly paid jobs. So, Switzerland gets 20% of 300k CHF, where France gets 50% of 50k Euros.
They thought they could have their cake and eat it too -- get the benefits of all the highly paid foreigners coming in to plow money into their economy while also keeping out the foreigners they wanted to keep out. Only people who actually understand the law (the staffers of the Swiss government) truly understood how insane the referendum was. So, to avoid the chaos of an accidental Swiss Brexit, the government had to basically ignore the results of the referendum and implement something very mild which was allowed within the terms of the treaties.
But, far from learning their lesson, there was yet another referendum just a few years later in 2020 that tried an even more explicit break in the treaties. This time it was voted down.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54316316
So, it's pretty insane to have a referendum that could potentially cancel the treaties that your entire economy is based on, leaving the vote up to people who have little to no understanding of the result of that vote. (Hi Brexit!)
Thanks for the thorough response. I was unfamiliar with this part of the story.