No more privileges for Franco-Swiss dual nationals: they will no longer be able to escape their military obligations in Switzerland. After the Council of States, the National largely accepted this Thursday a motion from MCG Geneva senator Mauro Poggia, who asks to “put an end to this hypocrisy”. Since the end of compulsory conscription in France, young dual nationals have a simple way to avoid recruit school. As allowed by an agreement signed by the two countries, they simply need to follow the civic information day in France to be exempt. Just as they are not subject to the exemption tax from the obligation to serve.
For centrist national advisor Isabelle Chappuis, rapporteur for the Security Policy Commission, the situation is clearly unfair. “How can we justify to a 19-year-old who is about to do eighteen weeks of recruit school that his classmate, who grew up in the same village, will be exempt only because he was one day in Paris to discover the functioning of the institutions of the Fifth Republic,” underlines the Vaudoise. More than 700 people each year manage to evade their obligations. For the elected official, this is not nothing in an uncertain geopolitical context, where the army is precisely seeking to ensure its numbers, as today with the project to tighten the conditions of access to civil service.
