From the Federal Vote to the Fribourg Rejection: A Democratic Grammar
Two formal votes, two clear decisions, and between them a striking coherence. Swiss voters massively support fiscal discipline when it is preventive, anticipated and fairly distributed. They reject it when it is imposed, demanded in haste and passed on to others — in the Fribourg case, partly onto the municipalities. It was not the principle of balanced public finances that was rejected on 26 April; it was the method.
I am writing this article from an ordinary municipality in the canton of Fribourg, Ursy, where on 20 April 2026 I brought a proposal to the municipal assembly to introduce a voluntary local debt brake. The 2025 accounts showed a net debt ratio of 331% and a self-financing ratio that had fallen to 1%. A citizen consultation conducted a few months earlier on a proposed municipal participation in the La Chaumière restaurant had ended with a ratio of roughly one favourable opinion to eight unfavourable — without carrying the weight of a formal popular vote, this nonetheless illustrates concretely what the cantonal and federal votes also reveal: voters are perfectly capable of distinguishing between expenditures they consider legitimate and those they no longer find acceptable.
The diagnosis is simple. The debt brake works at the federal level. It works, unevenly, in nearly every canton. But at the level where citizens actually live — the municipality — it is largely absent in French-speaking Switzerland and only partially present in Fribourg.
2003-2026: The Federal Debt Brake, an Exported Model
Before 2003, the Swiss Confederation's debt had been on a worrying upward trajectory. The debt-to-GDP ratio had risen from 8% in 1990 to roughly 25% by 2003, and the federal gross debt then stood at some 124 billion Swiss francs.
The mechanism adopted in 2001 is straightforward. Across an entire economic cycle, expenditures must not exceed revenues. A cyclical adjustment factor calibrates the annual expenditure ceiling to allow deficits during recessions and impose surpluses during boom periods. An exception clause requiring a qualified majority allows the rule to be temporarily suspended in crisis situations — it was activated during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The results are robust. According to the Federal Finance Administration, the federal debt fell from 124 to 97 billion francs between 2003 and 2019, a reduction of approximately 27 billion in seventeen years. The Confederation's debt-to-GDP ratio fell to 13.5% in 2019. Even after the extraordinary expenditures of the pandemic, it stood at 16.1% at the end of 2025 — still an enviable level by international standards.
The effectiveness of the instrument has been established by several academic studies. The synthetic control analysis by Pfeil and Feld (2024) shows that, compared to a counterfactual Switzerland without a federal debt brake, the rule has produced significant effects without depressing public investment. A recent study by Avenir Suisse estimates that without the debt brake, roughly 275 billion francs in additional debt would have accumulated since 2003.
The success was striking enough to set a precedent. Germany inscribed a Schuldenbremse in its Basic Law in 2009, modelled on the Swiss version. The European Fiscal Compact of 2012 committed most EU member states to introducing similar rules. Twenty years after its entry into force, the Swiss federal debt brake continues to enjoy broad support among the population and in Parliament.
The Cantons Followed Suit, But With Highly Uneven Rules
The cantonal story is longer and more diverse. St. Gallen — where I studied business administration at the HSG and lived for ten years before returning to the Lake Geneva region — had introduced a budgetary discipline mechanism as early as 1929, the first rule of its kind in Switzerland, and perhaps in the world. St. Gallen is no ordinary canton on these matters: a tradition of accounting prudence, frequent recourse to financial referendums, longstanding attention to public finances. The 1929 rule comes from that culture. Fribourg had a rule from 1960 onwards which imposed an automatic tax increase whenever the budgetary deficit exceeded 3% of revenues; the revised 1994 version remains classified by researchers Lars Feld and Gebhard Kirchgässner among the strictest cantonal mechanisms.
At the other end of the spectrum, the cantons of Geneva and Vaud long had more relaxed rules. Between 2012 and 2013, a wave of reforms swept through Aargau, Appenzell Outer Rhodes, Basel-Stadt and Geneva. Today, almost all 26 cantons have such a rule, but their design, their level of stringency and their sanction mechanisms differ greatly. The annual Comparative Analysis of Public Finances published by IDHEAP since 1999, together with the academic classifications by Feld et al., confirms this heterogeneity.
Aggregate results are positive but not unambiguous. Between 2010 and 2020, the median cantonal debt level remained stable at around 15% of cantonal GDP. A 2023 UBS study (Hofer and Holzhey, The Swiss Economy) notes, however, that this stability owes as much to the economic climate, to the generosity of the Swiss National Bank and to low interest rates as to the debt brakes themselves. The causal evidence for the role of cantonal debt brakes is more solidly established for periods of fiscal stress — the years 1980-2000 — when the work of Burret and Feld, of Schaltegger, or of Luechinger and Schaltegger demonstrated significant deficit reductions in cantons with strict rules.
The contrast with the present is striking. In 2024, the canton of Vaud activated for the first time in 22 years its constitutional "petit équilibre" mechanism, after a deficit of 369 million and a shortfall in cost coverage of 94 million; the Vaud Financial Consolidation Act (LAFin) imposed measures equivalent to that amount. The canton of Neuchâtel loosened its debt brake in February 2026 through a technical correction in order to recover roughly 9 million francs in annual investment leeway. Valais is debating, the Jura is adjusting — proof that cantonal debt brakes are not immobile, but that they hold.
One step lower, in the municipalities, the picture is altogether different.
Lucerne, Solothurn, Zurich: Three German-Swiss Models for Municipalities
The German-speaking experience offers three distinct architectures, which deserve close examination because they actually work.
Lucerne. On 20 June 2016, the canton adopted, by 110 votes to 3, its Law on Municipal Finances (FHGG) and the corresponding implementation ordinance (FHGV). Rather than a single debt brake, the Lucerne mechanism stacks four binding indicators: a minimum self-financing ratio of 80% averaged over five years once net debt per capita exceeds 1,500 francs; a minimum self-financing rate of 10%; debt service capped at 15% of current revenues; and a gross debt ratio capped at 200%. According to the cantonal statistical office LUSTAT, the average self-financing ratio of Lucerne's municipalities stood at 121% in 2022; in 2023, thirteen of eighty municipalities did not meet the binding threshold and were placed under specific monitoring. The City of Lucerne has additionally imposed on itself a stricter additional debt brake: a maximum budget deficit equivalent to 4% of the yield of one tax unit, which amounted to about 7.5 million francs at the time the rule was calibrated. This is precisely the kind of voluntary debt brake — set above the cantonal minimum — that I am proposing for Ursy.
Solothurn. I lived for a few months in Olten in the early 1990s. What I retained from that time was that people discussed Gemeindefinanzen at the local pub the way people in French-speaking Switzerland discuss the weather. A municipality going off the rails was news that travelled quickly. Twenty years later, the canton of Solothurn enshrined that culture in its law. The Municipal Law (§ 136 al. 3 GG) imposes a direct self-financing obligation of 80% in the next budget as soon as the net debt ratio exceeds 150% for political municipalities. The mechanism is supplemented by a graduated supervision system — the well-known Watchlist — administered by the cantonal Office for Municipalities, with four phases of increasing severity leading, in the absence of correction, to the supervision procedure provided for in articles 211 and following of the cantonal law. This is probably the most codified, most transparent and most pedagogically clear system in Switzerland: a municipality knows at all times where it stands within the framework, and what awaits it if it fails to correct course.
Zurich. The canton of Zurich opted for a hybrid approach. The cantonal Municipal Law (Gemeindegesetz of 20 April 2015, in force since 2018) requires a balanced operating budget, without a binding quantitative debt threshold. But municipal autonomy (Article 85 of the cantonal constitution) allows municipalities to go further. Several have done so. Dübendorf, in 2021, adopted a triple debt brake: medium-term balance, debt ceiling, and a stabilisation reserve set between 10% and 100% of the yield of one tax unit. Uster, Egg, and Gossau have seen similar popular initiatives. I lived for ten years in the canton of Zurich between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. Municipal votes on budgets regularly made the front pages of local newspapers, and it was not uncommon for a Voranschlag to be rejected at the assembly. The municipal executive then had to redraft. That was normal. None of my neighbours found it remarkable. The City of Bern, by contrast, rejected the introduction of a municipal debt brake in 2011, 2015 and 2020 — illustrating that this kind of rule is not politically self-evident, even when the cantonal framework permits it.
None of these three models is perfect. All offer citizens and municipal officials a level of transparency that French-speaking Switzerland does not have.
The French-Swiss Blind Spot: A Heterogeneous but Convergent Picture
No French-speaking canton has, at the municipal level, a quantitative debt brake comparable to those of Lucerne or Solothurn.
Vaud has relied since 2005 on a debt-ceiling system (Article 143 LC): each municipality sets a numerical ceiling at the start of each legislative period, and any modification during the period requires authorisation from the cantonal government. This is a political limit, not an automatic brake. The Vaud Association of Municipalities itself acknowledged this in its 2025 comparative analysis. And the figures speak for themselves. Over ten years, the debt of the canton of Vaud has declined by about 375 million francs to stand at 700 million by the end of 2023, while municipal debt has grown by 1.45 billion to reach 6.75 billion. Vaud municipal debt is today 9.6 times higher than the canton's, while municipal revenues are 1.66 times lower.
Geneva imposes on its municipalities, through the Municipal Administration Act (LAC), a strict budgetary balance requirement combined with a four-year financial plan to return to balance in case of deficit. But the current movement is towards loosening: bill 13507, under discussion in 2025, aims to introduce a cyclical reserve allowing municipalities to deviate temporarily from the rule.
Valais. The canton applies, at the cantonal level, a so-called "double debt brake" considered one of the strictest in Switzerland — it forced the cantonal parliament, in December 2025, to lower the salary indexation from 0.6% to 0.3% and to abandon the creation of twenty positions in order to comply with the rule. At the municipal level, however, articles 80 to 82 of the Municipal Law lay down a principle of long-term balance and provide for an escalation up to the appointment of a special commissioner by the cantonal government. No specific quantitative threshold.
Jura. The canton enshrined its debt brake in its constitution in 2007, by popular vote, after the tripling of cantonal debt in the 1990s. The mechanism — an 80% self-financing ratio — was recently adjusted on a transitional basis (vote accepted by 70.1% in May 2025) to neutralise the effects of the integration of Moutier. At the municipal level, however, the picture is concerning. According to the 2022 report of the Delegate for Municipal Affairs, the consolidated gross debt of the Jura municipalities reached 612 million francs, or 8,289 francs per capita, with continued upward momentum. Three out of ten indicators are classified as critical by the standards of the Conference of Cantonal Authorities for the Supervision of Municipal Finances. The Delegate himself publicly describes some municipalities as being "on life support".
Neuchâtel offers the most interesting architecture for anyone seeking a path forward for Fribourg. The Law on State and Municipal Finances (LFinEC of 24 June 2014) is, as its name implies, unified for both levels. The cantonal debt brake, in force since 2006 and broadly accepted by popular vote, has produced documented results: over the period 2006-2017, the operating account was in surplus on seven occasions with an average deficit of 13.7 million francs, compared to a single positive year over 1990-2005 with an average deficit of 43.7 million. At the municipal level, the City of Neuchâtel's regulation (RCF of 2021) explicitly refers to the LFinEC while setting its own self-financing rules. A single law for both levels, a municipal regulation that complements without contradicting. This is probably the model from which Fribourg should draw the most inspiration.
The German Counter-Example: When the Municipal Level Is Left Out
Across the Rhine, the Schuldenbremse modelled on the Swiss version was inscribed in the German Basic Law in 2009. It has been a success at the two levels it covers — the Federation and the Länder — but it explicitly excludes the municipalities (Article 109 GG), which remain subject solely to Land budgetary law. Eleven thousand municipalities and 295 districts (Landkreise) are thus left outside the federal mechanism.
The result is now documented. According to provisional data published by Destatis and taken up in 2026 by specialised analyses, the cumulative deficit of German municipalities reached 31.9 billion euros in 2025 — the worst result since reunification. Mandatory expenditures transferred from the federal level (social assistance, childcare, refugee support) are absorbed by municipalities without the German connectivity principle — "whoever orders, pays" — actually working in practice. The German mechanism works at the two levels it covers. At the third — the one it concerns least, the one that empties out in the meantime — it does nothing. This is precisely what threatens French-speaking Switzerland, and Fribourg to a lesser extent.
Fribourg: A Municipal Debt Brake That Exists But Cannot Be Seen
The Fribourg case is paradoxical. Contrary to what is sometimes said, the canton does have a municipal debt brake mechanism. It is laid down in Article 19 of the Ordinance on Municipal Finances (OFCo, in force since 1 January 2021): when the net debt ratio exceeds 200%, the average self-financing ratio over five years must reach at least 80%, failing which measures must be taken within a maximum period of five years. If those measures are not taken, Article 32 provides that the cantonal government itself sets the tax coefficients and rates for the following year — a form of fiscal guardianship.
This mechanism has been supplemented, since the 2026 financial year, by a new financial supervision concept of the Office for Municipalities, which classifies municipalities into three groups according to their operating result and net debt ratio, with systematic meetings after three years in group 2. On paper, Fribourg is therefore further advanced than Vaud, Valais or Jura.
But the comparison with the German-Swiss models reveals four structural weaknesses.
First, the trigger threshold is set too high. Solothurn activates its debt brake at 150% net debt; Fribourg waits until 200%. By the time the mechanism activates in Fribourg, a Solothurn municipality would already have been under formal monitoring for a long time.
Second, the five-year average introduces a delay in reaction. A municipality can accumulate three years of poor management without triggering the mechanism — precisely what happened in Ursy between 2023 and 2025, where the self-financing ratio fell from acceptable levels to 1% in a single accounting year, without the five-year average yet tipping over.
Third, the rule is invisible. It is buried in a little-read ordinance, without anchoring in the framework law (LFCo) itself. No public watchlist comparable to that of Solothurn. No dashboard accessible to citizens, to Fribourg municipal executives or to Vaud municipal councillors.
I have observed this invisibility from three different positions. Two terms as a municipal councillor in Forel (Lavaux) — at the Vaud legislative level. One term as a municipal councillor in Montet (Glâne), at the Fribourg executive level, before the merger with Ursy. And today, simply an active citizen at the municipal assembly of Ursy, the Fribourg legislative level. Across these three terms and that journey, I have never heard a Vaud municipal treasurer, a Fribourg municipal secretary, a mayor or an executive member cite the 200% net debt threshold as a warning signal. Not once. When I raised the question at the Ursy municipal assembly on 20 April 2026, I was told in substance that "the canton is monitoring the situation". The canton is monitoring, that is true. But it is monitoring in silence, in files that no one reads.
Fourth, the escalation towards guardianship is binary. Either the municipality complies with the rules, or the cantonal government sets its taxes. No public intermediate stages, no progressive warning system, no structured supervision comparable to the Solothurn Watchlist.
The Ursy case illustrates these limitations. When the report on the 2025 accounts was distributed to the citizens present at the municipal assembly, several faces froze when they reached page 30. Here is why. The net debt ratio reaches 331% — meaning 131 percentage points above the cantonal vigilance threshold. The self-financing ratio has fallen to 1%, against 21% in 2024. Net debt per capita stands at 9,088 francs. The final deficit is limited to 179,720 francs only thanks to a withdrawal of 995,311 francs from the revaluation reserve, which will be exhausted between 2030 and 2031. The situation should, on paper, trigger Article 19 OFCo. But because the five-year average has not yet tipped and because the supervision process is not public, the formal activation occurs late and quietly.
At the cantonal level, the 2024 report on municipal finances by the Office for Municipalities documents a worrying pattern: 55 of 126 municipalities show an operating deficit; this rises to 73 of 126 — that is, 58% — once financial operations are excluded. Cumulative reserves of 1.9 billion francs still serve as an accounting cushion. But this cushion masks rather than heals.
Four Trajectories, One Convergence
No rigorous comparison over ten or fifteen years currently allows us to measure precisely the causal effect of Swiss municipal debt brakes — the periods 2010-2025 are economically too benign to produce sharp contrasts. But four telling trajectories, drawn from official sources, deserve to be placed side by side. Territory Regime Key Indicator Recent Trajectory Lucerne FHGG since 2018, strict quantitative debt brake Average self-financing ratio Rose from 108% in 2020 to 121% in 2022; 51 of 80 municipalities are actively reducing debt Solothurn § 136 GG + Watchlist Graduated supervision Majority of political municipalities remain in initial phases without supervisory intervention Vaud Debt ceiling per legislative period Aggregate municipal debt +27% over ten years (5.30 → 6.75 bn CHF), while the canton was deleveraging by 35% Germany No municipal debt brake (Art. 109 GG) Cumulative municipal deficit Record of 31.9 bn EUR in 2025, the worst since reunification These trajectories, taken individually, do not prove the causal effect of a quantitative debt brake. But their convergence is hard to ignore. Where the municipal debt brake is calibrated and codified, the aggregates remain healthy. Where it is weak, absent or circumvented, the trajectories tend to diverge, at measurable rates. The municipal debt brake is no miracle cure. But its absence or weakness appears to come at a cost to municipalities — and, by extension, to citizens, who bear the consequences in the form of tax increases, service cuts, or intergenerational transfers.
What 26 April Actually Meant
On 2 December 2001, 84.7% of Swiss voters adopted a preventive debt brake at federal level, while public debt was still manageable. On 26 April 2026, 68.57% of Fribourg voters rejected a consolidation plan presented as indispensable, but perceived as belated and inequitably distributed.
A word of caution against overinterpretation. This vote does not prove that the Fribourg electorate wants a strengthened municipal debt brake — that question was not asked. A careful reading of the referendum arguments shows in fact that the opponents of the LAFE were arguing in favour of preserving public services, and reproached the centre-right majority for having lowered tax revenues too much in the past. The vote concerned the method of consolidation, not the principle of fiscal discipline.
What can be affirmed, on the other hand, is this. The LAFE was set to transfer charges from the canton to the municipalities — modest in appearance (around 10 million cumulated over three years according to the cantonal government's figures), but adding to all the pressures already weighing on municipal budgets. The 26 April rejection does not lift the constitutional balanced-budget requirement on the canton; it complicates it. The cantonal government must table a "second" 2026 budget by the June session, and opponents are now demanding the withdrawal of the entire PAFE programme, which had foreseen 405 million francs of improvements over 2026-2028.
In this context, the debate on the municipal debt brake does not depend on the LAFE outcome; it simply becomes more urgent. Fribourg municipalities will, one way or another, absorb part of the cantonal adjustment ahead. Without a robust steering mechanism, they will do so in the dark, under pressure, and probably unevenly — between those that have reserves and those that no longer do. The preventive municipal debt brake is not an act of submission to austerity. It is precisely the opposite: it is what allows a municipality to keep control over its own choices when the canton itself is losing control.
The LCo Has Passed; the Real Work Lies Ahead
A frequently confused legal point. The full revision of the LCo, which one might have considered the natural legislative vehicle, was adopted by 93 votes without opposition at the end of March 2026. But since 2018, the LCo no longer governs municipal finances. To calibrate a robust municipal debt brake, the appropriate vehicle is the LFCo and its implementing ordinance, the OFCo.
Three concrete avenues could feed a parliamentary motion or a popular initiative.
First, lower the trigger threshold of Article 19 OFCo from 200% to 150%, in line with the Solothurn standard. This single adjustment alone would have brought the Ursy intervention forward considerably.
Second, shorten the five-year average to three years to improve the responsiveness of the mechanism, and supplement the self-financing rule with a capped debt-service indicator, on the Lucerne model.
Third, publicly codify the watchlist of the Office for Municipalities, with its numerical thresholds and its sequencing, in the manner of the Solothurn Office for Municipalities. A municipality must know at all times where it stands and what that implies.
Two serious objections deserve to be addressed head-on.
The first concerns municipal autonomy. A cantonal municipal debt brake set at a low threshold does not dictate to municipalities what they must do; it sets a floor of attention beyond which a supervisory mechanism is triggered. Municipalities remain free in their choices as long as they stay in the green zone. The Neuchâtel model — a unified state-municipality LFinEC — has demonstrated for nearly twenty years that it is possible to harmonise requirements without trampling on local autonomy.
The second concerns the risk that the brake will stifle public investment. This is the argument heard on the left in French-speaking Switzerland, and it is not without weight: water, schools, mobility, energy transition — municipalities have investments to make that cannot wait until ratios are ideal. But the Lucerne figures provide an empirical answer: under the FHGG regime, since 2018, the investment ratio of Lucerne municipalities has remained at a high level (around 13-14% of current expenditures), and municipalities are not deprived of their major projects — they are simply required to self-finance a minimum share rather than passing them entirely onto debt. A well-calibrated debt brake does not kill investment; it forces investment to flow through a progressive self-financing discipline. That is a demanding constraint, but it is precisely what allows future generations to enjoy investment leeway in turn, rather than starting out burdened with the debts accumulated by their predecessors.
None of the three avenues proposed requires a revolution. All exist already in neighbouring cantons, and they work. The post-LAFE debate in Fribourg is precisely the moment to seize them.
Anticipate, Calibrate, Inscribe
The debt brake is not an ideology. It is a discipline. The Confederation adopted it in 2003 and is the better for it. Most cantons have followed suit, with uneven but convergent results. Some German-Swiss municipalities have done likewise.
I saw this discipline at work in St. Gallen during my studies and beyond. I encountered it again in Olten and in the Zurich suburbs. I then looked for it as I returned to French-speaking Switzerland, and I did not find it. Not because French-Swiss municipalities are any less serious — they are not, I have served on enough councils on both sides of the linguistic divide to know it. But because no one has given them the same measurement tools.
Thirty years working in both languages, ten years in the canton of St. Gallen, ten years in Zurich, and now Fribourg: if the Röstigraben of municipal finances teaches me one thing, it is that the difference between the two Switzerlands on this question is not cultural in any essentialist sense — it is institutional. Solothurners are not more cautious by nature; they have a Watchlist. Lucerners are not more rigorous by temperament; they have the FHGG. German-Swiss municipal discipline rests on tools. Those tools are reproducible. French-speaking Switzerland can adopt them — Neuchâtel has done so partially, and Fribourg could be next.
Anticipate rather than endure. Calibrate a solid municipal debt brake — neither a Solothurn import nor a French-Swiss vagueness, but an assumed Fribourg solution. And inscribe it in the law before the next LAFE forces us to do so under pressure.
The question now is who will open the worksite. A letter to the parliamentarians in charge of institutional matters. Joint work with the Association of Fribourg Municipalities. And, should Parliament hesitate, the filing of a cantonal popular initiative. None of these three avenues has yet been pursued in Fribourg on this subject. The ground is open. I am ready to break it with those who share this diagnosis.
There remains a question that this article has not asked, and that deserves to be treated separately: does this system, even when supplemented by a robust municipal debt brake, actually function as fiscal discipline — or is it not in part a silent mechanism for cascading the burden, from the Confederation to the cantons, then from the cantons to the municipalities? The "Disentanglement 27" project, whose interim report was published on 24 April 2026, two days before the LAFE vote, addresses the question for the Confederation-canton pair. It leaves out the municipal level. The second instalment of this diptych will address precisely that blind spot, and propose four principles for an integrated overhaul of Swiss fiscal federalism.
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