Swiss Parliament Bows Once Again to NATO!: Communists
- The Left Chapter
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
The Communist Party (Switzerland) expresses deep concern over the political developments of recent weeks regarding the defense sector. On the one hand, the Council of States (upper house of the Swiss parliament) has approved a motion to prevent the relocation of SwissP Defence, currently owned by the Italian private group Beretta. A motion that would never have been necessary had the company - once an integral part of RUAG Ammotec, a Swiss industrial asset - remained under public control. On the other hand, the National Council (lower house of the Swiss parliament) has approved a significant relaxation of the law on war material, authorising Swiss companies (de facto Beretta) to export weapons to countries (which, coincidentally, are mostly NATO members) involved in armed conflicts. This is a very serious turning point for Swiss neutrality, which the government is trying to downplay but which in fact turns the country into an indirect participant in foreign wars. These two decisions stem from the same dynamics of privatization, subordination to capital interests, and the ongoing erosion of Swiss neutrality, ultimately resulting in the sell-off of a strategic national sector to private - and even worse, foreign - interests.
The transformation of RUAG Ammotec from a state-owned enterprise into private ownership is a prime example of how privatizing a strategic sector inevitably leads to a loss of sovereignty. As long as it was in public hands, Swiss military production remained under democratic control and served a mandate of general interest: ensuring the country’s military autonomy and security. But with privatization, what was once a sovereign task has been subordinated to the demands of profit:
Beretta has not respected its commitments regarding the safeguarding of Swiss jobs, as clearly demonstrated today by its intention to relocate production;
The economic difficulties of the new private management are pushing the company towards the international arms market, exerting political pressure to relax Swiss war materiel legislation, thereby shifting the industrial logic from “national defense” to “export maximization”;
The Swiss Confederation, having surrendered a strategic sector, now finds itself forced to take emergency measures by approving defensive motions that would never have been necessary had industrial sovereignty remained intact.
This is the cost of privatization: loss of control, job blackmail, dependence on capital, and political pressure that leads to further concessions to the arms market and to major powers.
As we stated back in 2022, “the sell-off to Beretta means losing public control over the export of ammunition manufactured in our country. This means that Swiss-made weapons, already primarily destined for NATO, will be freely traded in countries at war, and today one cannot help but think whose hands they will end up in in Ukraine”. The loosening of the law on arms exports is therefore not a technical detail nor an isolated exception: it is a breach in Swiss neutrality. A Switzerland that exports weapons to countries at war can no longer fulfill its role as a neutral country (and thus as a potential mediator), but becomes an economic player (indirectly) involved in various conflict scenarios. Neutrality cannot coexist with profit-seeking through the arms trade, nor can it survive if the national defense sector is handed over to a private group which, in the name of profitability, put pressure on Parliament to relax ethical and legal constraints. The fact that the rightwing nationalist party SVP fails to understand this, only highlights the incoherence of a Party that claims to defend neutrality yet finds itself completely subservient to militarist elites aligned with NATO!