The 2023 Swiss federal elections: the radical right did it again

Abstract

The Swiss People’s Party emerged as the unambiguous winner of the 2023 Swiss federal elections. Thanks to a vote share of 27.9% obtained in the elections to the National Council, it managed to surpass Brothers of Italy to become the largest radical right party in contemporary Western Europe. By contrast, the Greens did not manage to confirm their electoral performance from 2019 and even fell below the important 10% mark. Their attempt to enter government by unseating a member of the Liberals clearly failed in the subsequent elections to the Federal Council. While the partisan composition of the government remained unchanged, it is likely to be subject to change in the future. The rise of the radical right is in line with national elections that have recently taken place in France, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands.

Keywords:

• Switzerland
• election
• radical right
• greens
• parties

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This rule applied to all campaign budgets for the elections to the National Council and only to successful ones for the election to the Council of States, which are considered cantonal elections from a legal point of view.

2 Note that here the corrected results the Federal Office of Statistics (OFS) published on 25 October are reported. On Election Day, OFS made some errors in the aggregation of party vote shares. Due to a programming error, party votes were counted more than once in three smaller cantons. This episode led to the curious circumstance that the latest polls were more accurate than the first official results as well as the projections of GFS, a private company commissioned by the Swiss Broadcasting Cooperation.

3 It needs to be mentioned that two changes in the partisan composition of the Council of States occurred during the 51st legislative term. The Social Democrats lost two seats –one to the Centre, the other to the Swiss People’s Party.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laurent Bernhard

Laurent Bernhard is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Democracy Studies (ZDA), which is affiliated to the University of Zurich. His main research interests include political communication, populism, direct democracy, and Swiss politics. [[email protected]]