The interesting part is that in CH, unlike in other democracies, if people will vote for it, it will be implemented. In the last referendum about UBI the proposal had ~23% support. And if the automation advances, that number may raise quickly.
Switzerland has a much more direct democracy than most (all?) other democracies. This means citizens often vote on things similar to ballot initiatives in the US.
In the context of basic income it means such a populist policy would be have different political barriers.
> Switzerland has a much more direct democracy than most (all?) other democracies.
Just for the record, that's not as wonderful as it may seem at a first look. Direct democracy has shown its limits some times during the last year. The fundamental issues being that you can only vote yes or no for a fixed text, while a law is usually supposed to be discussed in a parliament in every detail until an agreement can be found.
As far as I know, a referendum can take two forms: either it's the final text or it simply is a mandate to create a law with certain parameters, the lawmakers can then decide on the exact wording.
1. An addition to the constitution. The parlament then has to implement that into law.
2. A referendum on a law that has been passed by parlament. This allows the citizens to revert a parlamentary decision.
There is no way to vote on a new law directly. However you can get close by just having a very detailed constitutional change that doesn't leave a lot of options for implementation open.
Most democracies are simply democratic republics (i.e. the US), where only a small subset of the population can actually directly voice a choice on issues (i.e. see California's frequent ballot initiatives).
The proposal likely failed because it was too ambitious. The 2,500 Swiss franc a month level would have required doubling or tripling the federal budget.
