A second referendum in less than six months is organized on the Covid law. The authorities fear new events in the day.
Le Monde with AFP
Swiss vote on Sunday, November 28, on the COVID-19 law that created the health care, at the end of a helling election campaign. Sign of unusual tensions in Switzerland, the police blocked on Sunday the place in front of the Headquarters of the Government and Parliament in Bern, in anticipation of the demonstrations.
According to the surveys, however, the population should accept the law even though the anti-theft and anticipation have been able to make their voices heard in recent weeks by organizing many events, sometimes prohibited and enamelled with violence, but still remaining far from the real riots in the Netherlands or Guadeloupe.
The rise of tensions in Switzerland, a country renowned for its culture of dialogue and compromise and where referendums are organized several times a year in a soothing climate, had the effect of an electroshock. Many politicians, including the Minister of Health Alain Berset, who for two years has come to embody the fight against COVID in the alpine country, have been threatened with death and are now under police protection.
This referendum then intervenes that the new Omicron variant, detected in South Africa and qualified as “worrying” by the World Health Organization, plunged the planet in a state of alert.
Late on vaccine coverage
Swiss also vote Sunday on a popular nursing initiative that requires the Confederation to guarantee an “appropriate remuneration” of care benefits.
These votes intervene while Swiss knows as other countries a soaring infection from mid-October because of the delta variant. But unlike other countries in the same case, the Government has rejected at the moment to cure national control measures, arguing that the occupation of intensive care with COVID patients was relatively low. day (20%).
“The situation is for the moment controlled. If cases had to increase exponentially, it should be adapted as and when,” said Mr. Berset, at the press conference. The government, however, hurry in the cantons to take action and called on the population to comply with basic sanitary measures.
With a rate of entirely vaccinated people of about 65%, Switzerland is late in vaccination coverage compared to other Western European countries.
This is the second time in less than six months that the population must vote on the Covid law. In June, citizens had supported 60% of the votes during a first referendum. But the law having been modified to give more latitude to the authorities to combat the pandemic and enable the establishment of the CVID certificate, the anticipation decided to launch a second referendum.
“Extreme and useless hardening”
The referendum committee refuses this “extreme and unnecessary hardening of the Covid law” and particularly denounces the COVID certificate, “which implicitly induces forced vaccination”. For Audio, spokesperson for “Friends of the Constitution”, one of the groups at the origin of the referendum, this law “will create a two-speed company”.
All political movements, with the exception of the country populist UDC, the country’s first party, supports the law. “Suddenly, we are supposed to be divided between vaccinations and non-vaccinated. We must refuse this split,” denounced the President of the UDC, Marco Chiesa, which calls for “restoring freedom, fundamental rights and normality “.
The Government has argued that the certificate facilitates travel and stays abroad, allows the holding of events and is “available to all” because people not vaccinated and did not have the virus can be tested.
According to the latest survey of the Institute GFS.BERN directed on November 7, 61% of people wanting to participate in the vote then supported the COVID-19 law and 67% the nursing initiative. In the latter case, as it is a popular initiative, the majority of the cantons is also required for the text to be adopted.