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Who is opposed to the fact that corporations take responsibility for their actions? And who is in favor of poisoning rivers and exploiting people with impunity?
Because of these buzzwords, the corporate responsibility initiative sounded very compelling. Big NGOs started their highly professional voting campaign years ago, smearing millions and pointing their moralizing index finger at the left-wing green urban zeitgeist.
Y: you met weak opponents. Corporations are not popular. Especially not foreign bosses who make millions in a country they barely know. Rather than aggressively making its arguments public, the economy almost fell asleep in the referendum campaign.
Under these conditions, a massive yes, as the polls initially suggested, would not have been a surprise.
But Swiss voters have a strong sense of the sense and the nonsense of the initiatives. Nice titles won’t catch you off guard, but pay attention to detail. Many acknowledged that the initiative would have contributed nothing to the millions of people employed by Swiss corporations around the world.
And so the clear majority initially dropped to 50.7 percent of the votes in favor, a clear majority of the cantons said no. And with that, the constitutional amendment was discarded.
The NGOs were probably misled by their own moralism: it is quite possible that many people in the polls said yes to the initiative because they were “the good guys” in the eyes of the opinion polls, and then voted no.
The Swiss economy got lucky again. However, the result should give you pause: if such a far-reaching concern fails so closely against your interests, what will the next critical group initiative look like?