Secrecy as a political symbol

From the war taxes to the Banking Initiative

Banking secrecy was contested in Swiss domestic politics from the beginning. The parliamentary votes on the war taxes of 1915 and 1920, recorded in section I, show that the question of the tax authorities’ access to bank information divided the left from the bourgeois majority long before 1934. Guex records that in October 1933, at the height of the banking crisis, Socialist deputies renewed their demand to lift banking secrecy in order to combat tax fraud. The demand was rejected. Guex adds that Article 47, as a federal norm, subsequently stood in the way of cantonal fiscal reforms that would have required banks to report to the tax authorities, and that it strengthened the hand of business circles against Socialist and agrarian demands for a direct federal income tax.¹ Banking secrecy was thus from its origins a question of domestic distribution as well as of foreign relations.

The great confrontation came half a century later. On 8 October 1979 the Social Democratic Party submitted its popular initiative “against the abuse of banking secrecy and banking power” with 121,882 valid signatures. The initiative demanded that banks be obliged to provide information to Swiss and foreign authorities in cases of tax evasion and capital flight, extended transparency requirements including the disclosure of banks’ shareholdings, and compulsory deposit insurance.² Its background was the Chiasso scandal of 1977, the international debate on flight capital from developing countries and the growing criticism of the role of Swiss banks in apartheid South Africa and in the finances of dictators. Posters of the supporters spoke of flight money, blood money and hunger money.³

Parliament rejected the initiative in March 1983 without a counter-proposal. The National Council voted against it by 111 votes to 51 and the Council of States by 31 votes to 6. On 20 May 1984 the people followed with a clear verdict: 464,637 voters said yes and 1,258,964 said no, a no vote of 73.1 per cent, with a turnout of 42.5 per cent. Not a single canton accepted the initiative.⁴ The post-vote analysis quoted by the Année politique found that supporters had been motivated above all by the fight against tax evasion, while opponents feared an intrusion into their private sphere. The opponents had also relied on the self-regulation of the banks under the due diligence agreement of 1977.⁵

The campaign of 1984 was also the moment when the legend of 1934 did its most effective political work. Vogler notes that the initiative induced some bankers to present the law’s origins as humanitarian in order to defend it, which fixed the false narrative in public memory.⁶ The vote itself showed something more durable. A large majority of Swiss voters regarded banking secrecy as a protection of their own financial privacy against the state and voted accordingly.

A part of national identity

That understanding explains why banking secrecy acquired a symbolic weight comparable to neutrality or direct democracy. It was associated with the idea of a relationship between citizen and state based on trust, in which the state did not look into its citizens’ bank accounts because it did not need to. Opinion surveys and political rhetoric of the following decades repeatedly presented it as part of the Swiss model. The Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf Merz declared in March 2008 that foreign critics would break their teeth on Swiss banking secrecy, a year before the Federal Council abandoned its reservation on Article 26 of the OECD Model Convention.⁷ The symbolic defence of secrecy long outlasted its practical usefulness for the financial centre.

The symbol survived even the end of secrecy for foreign clients. In 2014 a committee led by the Zurich SVP National Councillor Thomas Matter and supported by the presidents of the CVP and the FDP, Gerhard Pfister and Petra Gössi, launched a popular initiative “Yes to the protection of privacy”, designed to anchor domestic banking secrecy in the Federal Constitution. The initiative responded to the Federal Council’s plans for a revision of tax criminal law that would have given tax authorities access to bank documents in cases of suspected intentional tax evasion.⁸ In December 2017 both chambers of Parliament made clear that they would not loosen domestic banking secrecy. The Council of States unanimously adopted a motion against the stricter tax criminal law, and Finance Minister Ueli Maurer conceded that the Federal Council had overreached with its original proposal.⁹ Having achieved its aim, the committee withdrew the initiative in January 2018, with Matter declaring that client secrecy was sufficiently protected under current law.

Notes

1. Guex, “Origins of the Swiss Banking Secrecy Law” (2000), on the Socialist demands of October 1933 and on the repercussions of the Banking Act for federal and cantonal tax policy. ↩
2. Année politique suisse / Politchronik, “Volksinitiative ‘gegen den Missbrauch des Bankgeheimnisses und der Bankenmacht’” (BRG 82.055), https://politchronik.swiss/de/prozesse/14420. ↩
3. Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, poster “Fluchtgeld – Blutgeld – Hungergeld – Bankeninitiative Ja – Den Banken endlich auf die Finger schauen!” (POCH), Bild + Ton, https://www.bild-video-ton.ch/bestand/objekt/Sozarch_F_Pe-0562. The catalogue entry gives the vote of 20 May 1984 and the yes share of 27.0 per cent. ↩
4. Swissvotes, vote no. 319, “Initiative ‘gegen den Missbrauch des Bankgeheimnisses und der Bankenmacht’”, 20 May 1984, https://swissvotes.ch/vote/319.00 (26.96 per cent yes, 0 of 23 cantons, parliamentary votes), and Politchronik (see above) for the absolute figures. ↩
5. Politchronik, “Volksinitiative ‘gegen den Missbrauch des Bankgeheimnisses und der Bankenmacht’” (see above), on the arguments of the parliamentary debate and the post-vote analysis. ↩
6. Vogler, Das Schweizer Bankgeheimnis (2005), pp. 6–7, on the use of the legend in the defence against the Banking Initiative. ↩
7. SRF, “Es war einmal das Bankgeheimnis”, 14 June 2013, https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/es-war-einmal-das-bankgeheimnis, quoting Merz in March 2008: “An diesem Bankgeheimnis werdet ihr euch die Zähne ausbeissen.” ↩
8. Vaterland, “Bankgeheimnis-Initiative wird zurückgezogen”, 9 January 2018, https://vaterland.li/region/schweiz/bankgeheimnis-initiative-wird-zurueckgezogen;art103,309673. ↩
9. SWI swissinfo.ch, “Parlament will Bankgeheimnis im Inland nicht antasten”, 12 December 2017, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/parlament-will-bankgeheimnis-im-inland-nicht-antasten/43747890. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.