Switzerland’s unusual form of democracy takes aim at Eurovision

THUN, Switzerland — Every year, the Eurovision Song Contest brings Europe together in a glitzy, campy, often sequined spectacle of pop culture extravagance. It’s been described as American Idol meets the Olympics — and, well, “American Idol on acid.”

But now, the glittering competition that draws millions and millions of viewers each year — and gave us stars like Celine Dion, who won for Switzerland in 1988 — is being drawn into culture war politics via a distinctive feature of Switzerland’s system of direct democracy. Millions of taxpayer dollars are at stake, which will have a drastic impact on the size and scope of next year’s competition.

Switzerland won the rights to host next year’s contest when the Swiss singer Nemo became the first nonbinary winner of the contest in 2024 — the small European country’s first victory since Dion came out on top nearly three decades ago. Late last month, Eurovision organizers announced they had selected the city of Basel as the official host city.

But a small conservative Christian political party called the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland has vowed to launch a referendum campaign against Basel’s decision to allocate 37.5 million Swiss francs (about $44 million) in city funding toward hosting the song contest. The party denounced Eurovision as “rife with antisemitism, blasphemy and Satanism,” pointing to performers like Ireland’s Bambie Thug, a self-described witch and “ouija popstar” whose performance featured a pentagram.

“For such a woke party, we Swiss are now supposed to pay a hefty bill?” the EDU asked in a video posted to social media.

Those criticisms of “wokeness” sound a lot like complaints U.S. conservatives made about the 2024 Olympics in France. Donald Trump attacked the opening ceremonies for featuring drag performers: “I’m very open-minded, but I thought what they did was a disgrace,” he told Fox News. And his running mate, JD Vance, falsely accused an Algerian boxer of being a transgender woman, attempting to tie her to Vice President Kamala Harris: “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match.”

But unlike the U.S., Switzerland’s direct democracy — the most developed of its kind in the world — offers citizens a much more sophisticated tool to take their culture war grievances directly to ballot boxes.

Up to four times a year, citizens in the Alpine country of 8.9 million show up to the polls to weigh in on a range of policy questions at the federal, regional and local level. The system allows citizens, parties and interest groups to propose their own policies (via initiative) or to challenge laws passed by the government (via referendum).

That means a big chunk of the funding for Eurovision 2025 could be rescinded in a direct vote by Swiss voters, depending on how they feel come election day in November.

This year, as Switzerland marks 150 years since it first introduced the referendum as a political tool on the federal level, its power as a vehicle for making policy and sparking national discussion are on full display — all because of a singing contest.

“Of course we take it seriously and it brings planning uncertainty,” said Edi Estermann, a spokesperson for the Swiss public broadcaster SRG SSR, which is producing the Eurovision show. “In the worst case, if such a vote were to go against the city’s financial contribution, the [Eurovision Song Contest] would have to be greatly reduced.”

Still, Estermann acknowledged it comes with the territory in Switzerland: “We live in a direct democracy, so the instrument of the referendum is part of it.”

In recent years, Swiss voters have considered everything from regulations on cow horns to a ban on burqas; they have voted three times on whether to scrap the country’s coronavirus restrictions and vaccination requirements (all three referendums failed) and on the country’s ambitious renewable energy targets (which voters upheld).

Both the left and the right have notched victories via direct democracy: A famous initiative in 2009, spearheaded by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, banned the construction of minarets across the country. Earlier this year, meanwhile, progressive activists won a major fight when voters approved their proposal to give citizens a 13th month of pension payments each year.

In many cases, initiatives and referendums fail — only around 10 percent of initiatives and 40 percent of referendums ultimately pass — but the quarterly votes provide what experts in Zurich and Bern say is an important pressure valve for political frustrations that countries like the U.S. mostly lack. “Even if you don’t do it, you know you could theoretically,” said Sean Mueller, a professor at the University of Lausanne who studies Swiss direct democracy. “This alleviates a lot of the disaffection other people in other countries experience toward politics.”

Especially on the local level, the threshold for triggering a referendum is relatively low: Opponents of the Eurovision funding would need to gather just 2,000 valid signatures within the 42-day window for the referendum to go forward. That would give them time to get the Eurovision referendum on the ballot in November — and according to Samuel Kullmann, the leader of the referendum campaign, that’s early enough to thwart the use of the funds altogether.

Kullmann said his party’s opposition to Eurovision funding isn’t just because it’s too “woke”: They have financial and security concerns as well. Why should a city like Basel, for example, suggest spending 37 million Swiss francs on Eurovision when the same city government has pledged only 12.9 million francs for next year’s women’s Euro soccer tournament?

He also pointed to protests in the Swedish city of Malmö during this spring’s song contest, which came as a result of Israel’s participation in the song contest, as proof that hosting Eurovision can pose a security threat.

But some of it, he acknowledged — like the pentagram and witchcraft imagery Ireland’s Bambie Thug used — feels personally offensive to the party’s Christian members. “We just felt it’s an egregious double standard that everything Christian has absolutely no place at all, but then we look at the performance of Bambie Thug and it’s overtly occult to a very, very high degree,” he said. “These double standards made us angry.”

The EDU is a small party with relatively few members nationally, but its plans for a referendum have gotten a boost via the country’s biggest party, the right-wing SVP, whose leaders have also been critical of Eurovision funding. “The money would be better donated to those seriously affected by the storms than wasted on this embarrassing rainbow event,” SVP leader Marcel Dettling said this summer after severe weather caused major damage in the country. The party’s youth wing in the areas surrounding Basel has said it plans to back the referendum effort.

Even if they succeed at getting the issue on November’s ballot, it’s far from certain whether a majority of voters in the relatively progressive city of Basel would support it. But even in that case, organizers say it has already served at least part of its purpose: forcing a national conversation about the merits of Eurovision and the downsides of being the country hosting the popular song contest.

The goal of an initiative or a referendum “is often also to bring an issue to political attention, to bring it onto the political agenda, even if maybe only a few people in parliament would approve it,” Kullmann said. “But you are able to launch a nationwide discussion on an issue that maybe was previously ignored by politics.”