Attack on public broadcasting licence fee clearly fails

Voters overwhelmingly decided not to pull the plug on the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation

(Keystone)

Voters have rejected a proposal to do away with the mandatory licence fee for Switzerland’s public broadcasters.

Provisional final results show 71.6% of voters throwing out the initiative, which was launched by the youth chapters of two major political parties on the right.

All the 26 cantons rejected the initiative. Urs Bieri, director of the leading GfS Bern research institute director said the 'no' voters were even among the majority in rural, traditionally more conservative regions.

The initiative committee indirectly conceded defeat but said the debate helped "break a taboo on the mandatory fee".

Campaigner Olivier Kessler told public radio that at the very least the vote was a "victory for direct democracy".

The "No Billag" (the service responsible for collecting the fee) campaign, largely supported by the rightwing Swiss People’s Party and libertarian groups, sought to limit the scope of state intervention. 

Their argument went that the SBC is too dominant, stifling competition by private media companies. The initiative was also supported by the Federation of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, which said the fee was unfair for companies.

Cohesion

On the winning side of Sunday's vote were the government, most of the country's political parties, as well as major institutions and organisations. 

They said that scrapping the licence fee would spell the end of the SBC, a key institution due to its contribution to the cohesion of the multilingual country and its importance for a functioning democracy.

The SBC director general, Gilles Marchand, said it was a good result for the public broadcaster in all the different Swiss language regions.

He pledged to make the SBC more efficient, cutting CHF100 million ($107 million) from the budget from 2019. He also promised to boost cooperation with the private media sector and to focus SBC programmes on information, culture, and to adapt to the challenges of the digital age.

Intense campaign

Sunday's vote follows several months of emotional campaigning by political groups and a broad range of civil society groups mainly supporting the SBC, including swissinfo.ch.

Public attention has been high and debates both in traditional and social media intense. 

Campaigning lasted for more than four months - an unusually long period of time, with heightened media attention during and after the final parliamentary debate in October.

Vote March 4, 2018Tax ‘total meltdown’ avoided

By Thomas Stephens

First projections show Swiss voters have comfortably renewed the government’s right to tax its citizens and companies for another 15 years.

See in another language: 1

Turnout was around 54%, above the average for a nationwide vote, and higher than expected by pollsters.

Discussions to continue

Under current regulations, every household and company must pay an annual fee of CHF451.10 ($482) and CHF597.50 respectively to use the SBC’s 17 radio and television channels in the national languages, German, French, Italian and Romansh, as well as their respective online services.

The fee accounts for 75% of the SBC's income, while the remainder is from advertising revenue.

In a bid to reform the current system, the government last year decided to lower the fee to CHF365 for private customers and between CHF365 and CHF35,590 for companies, depending on their size. The aim is to cap the financial contribution to the SBC at CHF1.2 billion annually, while a bigger share of the funding will be divided among the more than 30 private broadcasters.

However, moves are already underway in parliament to curb advertising revenue and cut the licence fee further.

The SBC has been under pressure notably from the political right and from private publishers for several years. In 2015, an attempt led by the Federation of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises to thwart a change in the funding system narrowly failed at the ballot box.

A year later, voters rejected an initiative to boost the public service sector.

Sunday's vote is the fifth unsuccessful attempt since 1982 to challenge the public licence fee in a nationwide ballot. Most of committees failed at an early stage and didn't collect enough signatures for an initiative.  

swissinfo.ch

Links

WEF 2018

WEF Teaser 2018