Switzerland National Council election 2015 — Results
Election day: October 18, 2015
- Swiss People's Party: 29.43%, 65 seats
- Social Democrats: 18.86%, 43 seats
- FDP.The Liberals: 16.39%, 33 seats
- Christian Democrats: 11.61%, 27 seats
- Greens: 7.06%, 11 seats
- Green Liberals: 4.63%, 7 seats
- Conservative Democrats: 4.11%, 7 seats
- Evangelical People's Party: 1.90%, 2 seats
Turnout: 48.40%
About this election
How the voting works
Switzerland's parliament, the Federal Assembly, is bicameral. The 200-member National Council (Nationalrat) represents the people and is elected every four years; each of the 26 cantons forms a single constituency, with seats apportioned by population. The twenty larger cantons use open-list proportional representation (the Hagenbach-Bischoff method, with no legal threshold), allowing voters to split their vote across party lists (panachage) and cumulate votes for individual candidates; the six smallest cantons each return a single member by first-past-the-post. The 46-member Council of States (Ständerat), the cantonal chamber, is elected separately under cantonal rules, mostly by majority vote. This page shows the National Council result, the proportional contest that best captures national party strength.
Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.
In numbers
- 10.57 points separated Swiss People's Party from Social Democrats — 263,832 votes.
- Swiss People's Party converted 29.43% of the vote into 65 of 200 seats (32.50%), 3.07 points more than its vote share.
- The top two shared 48.29% of the vote between them, and 6 lists cleared 5%.
- Support for Swiss People's Party ranged from 45.30% in SH to 11.30% in TI — a spread of 34.00 points across 20 regions, and it led in 13 of 20.
- Turnout of 48.40% is the highest of the 3 National Council elections covered here since 2015.
Calculated from the official figures on this page and from the other elections of this type in our archive.
Understanding this election
- How Live Election Data Is Collected and Verified — from ballot box to published figure
- Why Official Results Sometimes Take Weeks — the stages between the count and the legal result
- Why Turnout Figures Disagree — why two sources publish different turnout for one election