In a surprising vote 15 years ago, the small Swiss canton of Glarus lowered the voting age to 16. Since then, it has remained the only Swiss region to implement this, which might be related to the archaic voting system in the canton that regularly produces surprising results.
It was a rainy day, and the clouds hung deep over the citizens that gathered in the town of Glarus on the first Sunday of May 2007. The canton of the same name, one hour by train from Zurich, consists of one valley, enclosed by steep mountain slopes, open to the north and ever narrower towards the south, inhabited by only 40,000 people.
On the surface, one would not expect political revolutions to happen in this place. But looks are deceiving, and now and then, the people of Glarus deliver a political surprise.
To know why, one has to understand why local people gathered in the town square on that Sunday 15 years ago, braving the dismal weather.
Every year at that time, the so-called Landsgemeinde takes place, where citizens come together to discuss and vote on legislative changes in the cantonal law. Every citizen has the right to suggest a legislative change, which is subsequently debated and voted upon.
“The Landsgemeinde can create a special dynamic,” Daniel Kübler, a professor for democracy and public governance, told EURACTIV.
This special dynamic also seems to have played on that rainy day in 2007.
Ahead of the Landsgemeinde, a proposal had been tabled to increase the voting age to 19 and the passive voting rights to 20. In protest against this, then-20-year-old Michael Pesaballe of the young socialists tabled a proposal to give active and passive voting rights to citizens as young as 16.
The cantonal government reacted by coming up with an alternative proposal that would give youngsters the right to vote but would reserve the right to be elected into public office to citizens at least 18 years of age.
On the day itself, opinions naturally diverged. While an elder citizen argued that young people could not be given the responsibility as many of them were uninterested and lacked respect for the elders, Pesaballe argued that the young people should have a say because it was their future that would be most affected by the decisions.
Another young activist urged the inhabitants of the deep valley to “break through the high mountains of stubbornness.”
And break through they did. The vote was so close that it had to be repeated three times in a row to determine which proposal could get more hands in its support. Eventually, the result was proclaimed and 16- and 17-year olds got the right to vote.
“I hope this is a sign for other cantons, so that they go along and that it will then also be implemented nation-wide,” a proud Pesaballe told the Swiss public broadcaster immediately after the vote in 2007.
However, this remained only a hope.
While other trail-blazing decisions of the Landsgemeinde had a guiding character for the rest of Switzerland – for example, the 1864 factory law that introduced a 12-hour working day and laid the basis for a similar nationwide law in 1877 – the lowering of the voting age was repeatedly voted down in other Swiss cantons.
“Proposals to expand the suffrage have historically been very hard to pass,” Kübler said, explaining the reticence from the rest of the country.
In fact, in the only other Swiss canton that still uses this archaic procedure, Appenzell Innerrhoden, the institution of the Landsgemeinde is more infamously known for refusing to expand suffrage to women until 1991.
In Glarus, meanwhile, many see the lower voting age as a success.
“We see that, in the past years, young people have more often stood on the speaker’s podium [of the Landsgemeinde],” Marianne Lienhard, a member of the cantonal government for the nationalist-conservative Swiss People’s Party, told a local news outlet earlier this year.
However, Daniel Kübler, who analysed the aftermath of the decision in a 2021 study, found that 16- and 17-year-old citizens were less likely to participate in votes than the rest of the population.
He acknowledged that “it is generally true that young people tend to be less active voters than older people,” arguing, however, that this trend was no reason not to give young people the right to vote.
Lienhard also argued in this direction, saying that participation in the voting system should not be decided by age but driven by political interest.
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]
Source: euractiv.com
