Thanks to the democratic instrument called ‘popular initiative’, it is possible in Switzerland for anyone to demand a vote on a proposed change in the constitution. Having collected the required 100.000 valid signatures within 18 months, the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) proposed a new paragraph in the constitution that would require the central government to take measures as soon as the population had reached 9,5 million inhabitants. The aim was to prevent the country from exceeding the magical threshold of 10 million. In the intense debate leading up to the vote, it became obvious that the initiative had much support. Initial polls suggested that the majority was going to be in favor. Switzerland, currently at 9,1 million, has in fact grown extremely fast in the past decades – in fact, 2 million inhabitants since the year 2000.
The SVP had been clever enough to call their initiative a ‘sustainability initiative’: the current growth of population, industry, and infrastructure and the concomitant urbanization of the landscape did to many Swiss in fact look ‘unsustainable’, and they seemed willing to risk cutting the agreements with the European Union concerning the four ‘freedoms of movement’, with all the economic consequences that would have resulted from a unilateral pull-out.
Philosophy professor Christoph Lüthy, who still holds a Swiss passport, was fascinated by the fact that the Netherlands has the same surface as Switzerland (ca. 41.000 km²), but twice as many inhabitants, and that here, too, there has been a “Club of Ten Million” that tried to keep the number of inhabitants under that number – but obviously failed: the Netherlands now stand at 18,4 million. He tried to answer the question of whether a country can ever be said to be ‘full’, and which parameters would have to be used to determine that. Under the title “Die 18-Millionen-Schweiz. Was wir von den Niederlanden über demographische Grenzwerte lernen können”, he published a comparison between the two countries in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 23 May. As a consequence, he was interviewed by Het Financieele Dagblad on 12 June. In a second interview, for Die Zeit (13 June), he proposed that instead of voting on one parameter such as the number of inhabitants, one ought to vote on scenarios, in a so-called preferendum. In such a preferendum, the idea of stopping immigration would have to be connected to the issues of international isolationism, a higher retirement age and lower pensions. This scenario would need to be put next to alternative scenarios, with the population having to decide the overall direction of the country for the coming decades.