ZURICH — Voters in the canton of Zurich rejected on Sunday a proposal to end French lessons in primary schools, by 52.3 percent to 47.7 percent, preserving a cornerstone of Switzerland’s language policy that had come to seem fragile in its largest German-speaking canton.
The initiative, brought by a committee of teachers and parents with the backing of the canton’s largest party, would have delayed French until the seventh grade, arguing that 10-year-olds already learning English, High German, and in many cases a home language were overloaded, and that French skills at the end of primary school were, as the committee put it, “politely described as modest.”
French-speaking Switzerland saw it differently. Politicians in Geneva, Lausanne, and Neuchâtel described the vote as a test of whether the country’s German-speaking majority still regarded the national languages as a shared obligation. “If Zurich drops French, Thurgau drops it on Monday and Aargau on Tuesday,” Céline Rochat, the head of Geneva’s education department, said before the vote. “And then a child in Geneva learns German for a neighbor who has stopped learning her.”
Regula Baumann, Zurich’s education director, who campaigned against the initiative, said the result was a relief but not a vindication. “Forty-eight percent of voters told us that French in primary school is not working,” she said on Sunday evening. “They are not wrong about the outcomes. They were wrong about the fix.” She said the canton would propose smaller classes for French, more exchanges with French-speaking cantons, and a review of the textbook, which teachers have criticized for years.
Thomas Keller, who led the initiative committee and teaches fifth grade in Winterthur, said he did not regret bringing the vote. “Three points,” he said. “Ten years ago this would have been 70-30. The canton has been told to fix it, and now it has to.”
Switzerland’s cantons control education, and a 2004 agreement among them requires that children learn a second national language and English in primary school, with the order left to each canton. Several German-speaking cantons have since tried to drop or delay French, and all have failed at the ballot box, though by shrinking margins. The federal government has said it would intervene with national legislation if a canton broke ranks, a threat it has never had to carry out.
Sandra Wyss, who teaches French to 11-year-olds in Zurich’s Kreis 4, said she had spent Sunday afternoon refreshing the results on her phone. “I do not pretend my pupils will leave me fluent,” she said. “I would like them to leave me knowing that Lausanne is in their country.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 4 of the European edition with the headline: Zurich Voters Decide Schoolchildren Will Keep Learning French, Narrowly.
