Less than a week before Swiss voters go to the polls on September 27, two popular initiatives put forward by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) — the Pro Suisse Neutrality Initiative and a separate food initiative — look set for heavy defeats according to the second wave of gfs.bern polling for SRG, reported by SWI swissinfo.ch on September 16. The neutrality initiative would be rejected by 63% of voters, with only 34% in favour; the food initiative is tracking 64% against to 31% in favour, a 15-point jump in opposition since the previous gfs.bern wave.
A second poll, this one from Leewas for 20 Minuten/Tamedia and published the same day by Bluewin, comes out slightly worse for the neutrality initiative: 69% of likely voters say they intend to vote no, with just 27% planning to back it. The Bluewin writeup also confirms the food initiative’s numbers from the SRG wave — 29% support against 64% opposition — making it the second initiative to head into the final stretch with a deficit of more than thirty points.
The numbers are not just soft; they have hardened in the wrong direction for the sponsors. Le News’s independent writeup of the gfs.bern second wave notes that rejection of the neutrality initiative is up nine points compared with the previous poll, while opposition to the food initiative is up fifteen. Demographic breakdowns there are unusually clean: only SVP supporters and, in a more conditional way, Greens still back the food initiative; every other major grouping is net-negative, with the centre and centre-right particularly lopsided against it.
That clean partisan split matters, because both initiatives were always going to rely on pulling voters from outside the SVP’s own base to clear the double-majority threshold that Swiss popular votes require. A ballot can pass on a majority of the popular vote and still fail if a majority of cantons reject it, and cantonal majorities tend to track the centre parties more than the federal popular vote does. The Le News piece is explicit on this: the second-wave gfs.bern numbers show the neutrality initiative losing ground specifically among FDP and CVP/centre sympathisers — the same voters whose cantonal weight tends to determine the outcome of any federal vote — and the food initiative now running more than thirty points behind in the same group. With a week to go, there is no realistic path for either initiative to flip the cantonal map, which is what would be required to overturn a result this lopsided on the popular side.
The Pro Suisse Neutrality Initiative, in particular, was framed as a constitutional pushback against what its sponsors describe as creeping alignment with NATO and the EU on sanctions policy. Its central proposal would have barred the federal government from participating in any sanctions regime not explicitly authorised by the UN Security Council, and from providing non-humanitarian material aid to parties to armed conflicts — measures its supporters argue would force Switzerland back toward the strict, armed-neutrality posture it held during the Cold War. That premise is the part the polling has quietly settled: roughly two-thirds of voters, on both published measures, are not persuaded that the country’s current neutrality arrangements need rewriting, even on the security frame the SVP has been pushing hardest for the last six months.
For an initiative to lose this badly this close to a vote is, at this point, more a measurement than a contest. The two published second waves agree on the neutrality initiative within six points (63% no / 34% yes for SRG; 69% no for the Leewas-Tamedia wave), and they agree on the food initiative within a point (64% no across both). The remaining days will shift the totals at the margin, but the structural question — whether either initiative can recover enough support in the centre to turn a thirty-point deficit into anything close to a competitive race — is one the polling has already answered.