In September 2020 Swiss voters approved a new fighter fleet by 8,515 votes out of more than three million cast. It was the narrowest margin in modern Swiss defence politics, and the case for it rested heavily on one reassuring word: the price was fixed.

On Tuesday afternoon the Nationalrat accepted that it was not. By 128 votes to 62 with five abstentions, the lower house granted the defence ministry an additional 394 million francs for the F-35A. The Ständerat had already passed the same Armeebotschaft in June, so the matter is closed. No referendum is possible.

What the auditors actually found

The vote came a week after the Nationalrat’s audit committee, the Geschäftsprüfungskommission, published a 95-page report on 8 September built from nineteen hearings with twenty-one office-holders and more than seven hundred documents. Its central finding is narrower than the headlines suggest, and the distinction matters.

Switzerland did negotiate a fixed-price clause. What it did not have was the flat, all-in fixed price that was described to parliament and to the public. In the committee’s words, the clause “did not correspond to the flat fixed price that was communicated”.

The reason is structural, and it is worth understanding because it applies to every Foreign Military Sales customer, not just Switzerland. An FMS purchase is not a contract with Lockheed Martin. It is a Letter of Offer and Acceptance between the buyer and the United States government, which then negotiates separately with the manufacturer for each production lot. Under the Arms Export Control Act, Washington may only buy on a foreign customer’s behalf against an undertaking to pay the full cost and indemnify the US government against loss. A genuine American fixed-price guarantee would expose the US Treasury to exactly the loss the statute forbids.

The committee put the logical trap plainly: if the so-called fixed price only comes into being when the contract between manufacturer and US government is concluded, then it cannot simultaneously already have been fixed in the contract between Switzerland and the US government. The phrase “estimated costs” appears seven times in the Swiss documents.

The warnings that were waved away

Two moments stand out. In November 2021 the external law firm advising the project proposed deleting around twenty of the “best efforts” and “estimated costs” formulations from the draft. The deletions never made it into the contracts.

Then in May 2022 the Federal Audit Office recommended booking the legal uncertainty around the fixed price as a financial risk. Armasuisse rejected the recommendation outright, called the auditors’ reading misleading, and argued that publicly questioning the clause was liable to damage Swiss interests. The committee’s verdict on that response is that it was not appropriate.

One point deserves emphasis, because the political rhetoric has run well ahead of the document. The report contains no finding of deliberate deception. The words for intent do not appear in its 95 pages, and the subcommittee chair said publicly there were no indications of intentional misleading. What it criticises is inadequate leadership, poor record-keeping and communication that was far more absolute than the paperwork supported. There has been no disciplinary or criminal referral.

Thirty aircraft, or thirty-six

Here is the detail most reports get slightly wrong, including the one that broke this story. Switzerland has not cut its order. The contract signed in September 2022 still covers 36 aircraft. What the government has done is decline to ask for the money that 36 would now cost.

In December 2025 the Bundesrat concluded it could not enforce the agreed fixed price and instructed the defence ministry to buy the maximum number of aircraft possible within the six-billion envelope. On current estimates that is about thirty. The definitive figure cannot be set until Washington has negotiated its own contracts for the remaining production lots, and Switzerland must notify the Americans by the second quarter of 2027 to hold its slots.

Walter Gartmann of the SVP, speaking for the security policy committee, framed it as exhausting rather than exceeding the voters’ mandate: the aim, he told the chamber, is to procure at least thirty F-35 and thereby stay within the financial volume the electorate approved.

The debate

Thomas Hurter of the SVP went the other way and moved to raise the credit to 1.044 billion francs, enough for all 36. The FDP backed him. It failed, 89 votes to 102. Hurter’s warning to colleagues tempted to cut instead was blunt: reduce the credit, he said, and Switzerland flies out of the programme.

From the left, Priska Seiler Graf of the SP returned to the argument her party has made since 2020.

Heinz Theiler of the FDP gave the sharpest summary of the bourgeois position, conceding the failure while refusing the conclusion. The report, he said, was unpleasant but necessary reading; there never was a flat fixed price and one was communicated anyway, to parliament and to the public. But whoever derives a future project cancellation from a past communication failure punishes the wrong people.

Reto Nause of Die Mitte told the chamber he had read the purchase contract and that the fixed price is in there, arguing that separate American clauses exist to stop US taxpayers financing other countries’ inflation. Gerhard Andrey of the Greens, who moved unsuccessfully to send the whole thing back, put the arithmetic at its most uncomfortable: Switzerland is being asked to add 394 million francs in order to receive six aircraft fewer than planned.

The minister’s answer

Martin Pfister has held the defence portfolio only since April 2025, inheriting a file negotiated by his predecessor. He declined to debate the audit report on the floor, saying the Bundesrat would respond to it quickly rather than waiting for its December deadline, but he did not pretend it was painless.

On the substance he was unmoved. A further reduction in the number of fighters, he argued, would seriously limit the protection of the population, which makes the supplementary credit indispensable. Answering the bottomless-pit line directly, he said it is not a barrel without a bottom but a question of changed circumstances. And he offered the chamber a formulation that could serve as an epitaph for the whole programme: the prioritisation before you represents not what is militarily desirable but what is financially feasible.

What happens now

The money is voted and the business is finished. Eight aircraft are due from Fort Worth in 2027 and will go to Arkansas for pilot training, with the remainder built at the Leonardo line in Cameri. The first Swiss jets land in Switzerland in mid-2028, at Payerne, followed by Meiringen from 2030 and Emmen from 2032. The Bundesrat owes parliament a formal answer to the audit committee by 11 December.

The rest of the armament programme passed comfortably and drew praise from parties that never wanted the F-35: Skyranger short-range air defence guns built in Oerlikon, more money for counter-drone work, more for cyber. Several speakers on the left said the government had finally produced a programme addressing actual threats rather than military wish lists. It is a curious sort of vindication, arriving on the same afternoon as the bill.

Swiss public broadcaster SRF on how the F-35 became the problem jet.

Sources: Amtliches Bulletin der Bundesversammlung, business 26.025; VBS/DDPS; report of the Geschäftsprüfungskommission des Nationalrates, 8 September 2026; 20 Minuten; Keystone-SDA; CH Media; Swiss Federal Chancellery.