Switzerland to hold referendum on same-sex marriage
Switzerland will hold a referendum on whether to push ahead with same-sex marriage after opponents forced the government to hold a binding vote on a 2020 law allowing gay couples to marry.
The Swiss parliament passed a bill recognising same-sex marriage last December, several years after most other western European states.
On Tuesday, the country’s federal chancellery announced that critics of the law had gathered 61,027 valid signatures in favour of putting the matter to a national vote.
Under Switzerland’s system of direct democracy, members of the public can veto parliamentary decisions via a referendum if they manage to collect 50,000 valid signatures within 100 days of the official publication of the act.
The federal chancellery will in May set a date for the plebiscite, which would not be held before September. Swiss citizens are sent envelopes stuffed with ballot papers and voter information about four times a year, asking them to cast their vote on a range of questions.
The push for the same-sex referendum came from a cross-party initiative, campaigning with the slogan “Yes to marriage and family, no to marriage for everyone”, which decries same-sex marriages as “fake” and argues only a man and a woman can enter a “natural” bond for life.
The law passed in December also grants lesbian couples access to sperm donation, which opponents said would create a slippery slope: “What next?”, asks the campaign’s website. “Surrogate motherhood for gay couple – the degradation of women to the status of a purchasable birthing machine?”
Operation Libero, a liberal political movement launched in the aftermath of the Swiss immigration referendum in October 2014, has said it will campaign to keep the law in place.
A petition launched by Operation Libero, stating that “it is important that people in Switzerland can get married irrespective of their sexual orientation or gender identity”, has gathered 100,000 signatures this month.
In a November 2020 poll by the LGBT umbrella organisation Pink Cross, 82% of respondents expressed approval of same-sex marriage in strong or mild terms.
Most western European countries have over the last two decades introduced laws allowing couples of the same sex to marry, with the Netherlands leading the way in 2001. France legalised same-sex unions in 2013, followed by England and Wales in 2014, and Germany in 2017.