Why the Fifth Switzerland votes

Some 838,600 Swiss citizens live abroad, 11.3% of all Swiss citizens. About 660,000 of them are old enough to vote, more than 200,000 of those are registered, and, on our estimate, fewer than one in ten adult Swiss abroad votes in a given federal ballot.1 This page explains why the Fifth Switzerland votes, and why we think it should.

Where the Fifth Switzerland comes from

Switzerland counts itself in four: German, French, Italian and Romansh. Its citizens abroad are counted as the fifth. The name claims a place inside the country for the people who have left it. The Organisation of the Swiss Abroad held its first congress in 1918. Most of the people in the room would wait nearly sixty years for a federal vote.

Why the question keeps coming back

No proposal to take that right to vote away is before Parliament today, as far as we know; the last one, filed in 2017, had no majority by its own author’s account (see below). You might think that settles it. It doesn’t, because the doubt about the diaspora vote comes back every time a result is close.

Take September 2020, when the vote to buy new fighter jets passed by 8,670 votes (50.1% to 49.9%). In the twelve cantons that count their citizens abroad separately, 51.1% of them had voted No, and many Swiss abroad reported ballots that arrived days late or never. Had those ballots arrived in time, the result could have gone the other way.

Or take the 2024 vote on a thirteenth monthly pension payment, when the right-wing populist SVP cast pensioners abroad as profiteers in its campaign. Both episodes ask the same question: why do people who don’t even live in Switzerland get a say in what happens to us?

The strongest objection

The criticism is: “You get to vote on the consequences; we have to live with them.” A Swiss citizen in Buenos Aires helps decide a food policy whose costs land on farmers in the Emmental and shoppers in Lausanne, then goes back to an everyday life those costs never touch.

Its most formal version came from Andrea Caroni, who sits in the Council of States (the upper chamber) for the FDP (the liberal party) from Appenzell Ausserrhoden. He has repeatedly proposed, including in Parliament in 2017, that dual citizens who have been gone for more than twenty years should have their vote switched off, to be switched back on if they return. After that long, he argues, you can assume the person isn’t coming back and won’t be affected by the decisions.2 Someone who has never lived in Switzerland, or left forty years ago, is in his words taking decisions that affect only other people.3 In 2019 he admitted the idea had no majority.

He has a point. The question is what should follow from being less exposed, or not exposed at all, to the results of a vote.

Exposure is not a good measure

Suppose we took the principle seriously and gave each vote to the people who bear its consequences. Who bears the consequences of a farm-subsidy vote? Farmers, mostly. So the voter in Geneva, who has never farmed and never will, should sit that one out. People without children should not vote on school policy, and on and on.

Nobody proposes any of this, because it can’t be done. Someone would have to decide who counts as affected enough, and any line they drew would be a guess dressed up as a rule. Caroni’s own design shows the problem. The vote comes back the day you return, so even he accepts that membership lasts. What he wants to measure is exposure, and a twenty-year line measures it badly: the expatriate in year nineteen who is packing to come home and the one in year twenty-one who never will are sorted by the calendar and by nothing else. Exposure is a reason to vote carefully. It should not decide who votes.

Whose country it is

Look at what Switzerland actually votes on. Neutrality, who counts as Swiss, whether to buy fighter jets at all. These are questions about what kind of country Switzerland wants to be, and the people with a claim to answer them are its members. Swiss citizens abroad are members: they are Swiss by the same law of descent as everyone else, and the resident electorate confirmed it at the ballot box in 1966 (see Appendix A).

Distance has advantages as well as drawbacks. The Netherlands opened marriage to same-sex couples in 2001 and Germany in 2017; Switzerland voted on “Ehe für alle” on 26 September 2021. A Swiss citizen in Amsterdam had lived for twenty years with the law Switzerland was deciding on. On some questions the view from outside is the better-informed one.

And some votes directly affect the Fifth Switzerland. A child born abroad to a Swiss parent, holding a second passport, loses Swiss citizenship at 25 unless registered with a Swiss authority by then. If you live abroad and your country is voting on whether your children are Swiss, you have a vote or you have the exit.

Why the vision matters

One more objection is that the diaspora vote is expressive: a feel-good vote for an idealized Switzerland, cast by people who don’t have to pay for it. But a vote for an ideal is how the country changes, and whether it can win this year has nothing to do with whether it is worth casting.

In February 1959 Swiss men voted on whether women should vote, and said No, 66.9% to 33.1%. The third who said Yes were voting for a country that didn’t exist and, by the looks of it, wouldn’t soon. Twelve years later 65.7% said Yes. The diaspora franchise itself was an idea before it was a reality. It was written into the Constitution in 1966, usable only by travelling to Switzerland until 1992 (see Appendix A). Every step toward the ideal Switzerland was an expressive vote first.

The Fifth Switzerland carries a vision of the country shaped partly by seeing it from outside. We think inviting that vision into the conversation is in the spirit of a country that wrote its emigrants into its Constitution, and in the spirit of democracy generally. Many democracies let their citizens abroad vote; Italy even reserves parliamentary seats for them. What Switzerland does is rarer: it hands them the question itself, up to four times a year, and asks them to decide. That is our view, and it is one reason this site exists.

Still part of the “we”

The Fifth Switzerland should neither pretend that living abroad makes no difference nor accept that crossing a border turns a citizen into a spectator. Swiss citizens abroad remain members of the political community, and those who register and vote show it.

If you are Swiss and abroad, whatever your politics, you should register and vote.

Appendix A — How the Fifth Switzerland got the vote

1966. Voters approve a dedicated constitutional article on the Swiss abroad (Art. 45bis of the old Federal Constitution) with 68.1% Yes, all cantons in favour, on 47.9% turnout. Parliament had backed it unanimously: 112 to 0 in the National Council, 33 to 0 in the Council of States.

1975/1977. The federal act of 19 December 1975 on the political rights of the Swiss abroad enters into force on 1 January 1977. Citizens abroad can now vote in federal matters, provided they travel to Switzerland to do it. Participation stays tiny.

1992. Postal voting from abroad begins on 1 July 1992, on a motion by Zug National Councillor Georg Stucky. The franchise becomes usable. Registrations climb from roughly 14,000 at the time to more than 200,000 today.

2014/2015. The Swiss Abroad Act of 26 September 2014 (in force 1 November 2015) consolidates the rules: registration through the Swiss representation, no renewal requirement, deregistration and re-registration possible at any time.

Today. Several cantons additionally offer e-voting to their registered Swiss abroad under the current federally supervised trial. Availability changes by canton and vote date; see our voting guide for the current state.

Appendix B — The legal basis

Constitution. Art. 136 para. 1 of the Federal Constitution grants political rights in federal matters to all Swiss citizens aged 18 and over. Residence in Switzerland is not among the conditions. Art. 40 empowers the Confederation to legislate on the rights and duties of the Swiss abroad, expressly including the exercise of political rights at federal level.4

Statute. The Swiss Abroad Act (ASG, SR 195.1) provides that Swiss abroad aged 18+ may exercise federal political rights (Art. 16); that the voting commune is the last commune of residence in Switzerland, or the commune of origin for citizens who never resided in Switzerland (Art. 18); that registration runs through the competent Swiss representation and may be entered, cancelled, and re-entered at any time (Art. 19); and that cantons may keep a central register for their Swiss abroad (Art. 20). Registered voters abroad are struck from the register only when voting material is returned as undeliverable three times in a row, with re-registration available on request. The federal Political Rights Act (BPR, SR 161.1) applies subsidiarily.

Practice. Ballot materials are dispatched to the foreign address by priority mail, in any of the four official languages at the voter’s choice; cantonal dispatch windows differ, and the returned envelope must arrive by the cantonal deadline to count. Details and current e-voting availability: our voting guide.

  1. Registered: more than 200,000; SWI swissinfo.ch reported over 230,000 in June 2025 (https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/schweizer-politik/die-mehrheit-der-auslandschweizerinnen-wird-2027-nicht-online-w%C3%A4hlen-k%C3%B6nnen/89305366); no single federal tally is published. Turnout: our aggregation of the Federal Chancellery VoteInfo Auslandschweizer units for the eight reporting cantons (ZH, AG, SG, BS, LU, TG, AI, UR), 14 June 2026: pooled diaspora turnout 28.2%, against 58.9% nationally. Partial — the diaspora in the cantons that report it separately, not the Swiss-abroad vote. Roughly 28% of 200,000 to 230,000 registered is on the order of 60,000 ballots, under 10% of the ~660,000 Swiss abroad of voting age; the extrapolation is our estimate. Method and data: https://swissabroad.vote/10-million-measure-rejected/ [↩]
  2. Original (German): «Aber nach einer gewissen Zeit, nach 20 oder 25 Jahren, wenn man davon ausgeht, dass die Person nicht mehr zurückkommt, also auch nicht mehr von den Entscheidungen betroffen sein wird, soll daher ihr Stimmrecht ruhen.» — https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/stimmrecht-unter-druck-weniger-politische-rechte-fuer-auslandschweizer [↩]
  3. Original (German): «Wenn nun jemand noch gar nie in der Schweiz gelebt hat oder seit 40 Jahren nicht mehr, dann finde ich es demokratiepolitisch etwas problematisch, wenn er dann trotzdem bei uns Entscheide fällt, die nur die anderen betreffen.» — https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/stimmrecht-unter-druck-weniger-politische-rechte-fuer-auslandschweizer [↩]
  4. Original (German), Art. 40 Abs. 2 BV: der Bund erlässt Vorschriften über die Rechte und Pflichten der Auslandschweizerinnen und Auslandschweizer, «namentlich in Bezug auf die Ausübung der politischen Rechte im Bund» — https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404/de [↩]