A Veto and an Exit Clause

In March 2003 the electorate of Liechtenstein was asked to give its head of state the power to dismiss the government, a decisive say over who becomes a judge, the ability to rule by emergency decree, and confirmation of an existing right to refuse assent to anything parliament passes. Turnout was 87.7 per cent, which is close to everybody. Sixty-four point three per cent voted yes. A rival proposal on the same ballot, put by a citizens' group and designed to trim the Prince's powers rather than extend them, was rejected by more than eighty per cent.

The vote gets reported abroad as a curiosity — small country, quaint monarch, funny result. It was nothing of the kind. Hans-Adam II had spent a decade arguing in public with his own parliament and had made the terms explicit: if the amendments failed, the princely family would withdraw from politics and return to Vienna, where it had been based for centuries before his father took up permanent residence in Vaduz in 1938. The threat was credible because the house does not live off the state. Its money sits in the Prince of Liechtenstein Foundation, whose principal asset is the LGT banking group, and it had already survived losing far more than this: Czechoslovakia confiscated the family's estates in 1945 under the Beneš decrees — around 1,200 square kilometres, some seven and a half times the area of the principality — and Liechtenstein withheld recognition of the Czech Republic and Slovakia until 2009 over it. Everybody doing the arithmetic in 2003 understood that the Prince could leave and the country could not.

What he asked for

The 1921 constitution already gave the Prince a genuine veto rather than a ceremonial one: no law takes effect in Liechtenstein without his sanction, and a law he declines to sign within six months simply lapses. The 2003 amendments went further. He gained the power to dismiss the government outright, an effective hand on judicial appointments through a selection body he chairs, and a clearer footing for emergency decrees — which, in the fine print, were actually tightened, capped at six months where the old text had set no limit at all. Parliament kept every power it had to legislate. What it lost was any expectation that legislating was the end of the matter.

And what he put on the other side of the ledger

Article 113 of the revised constitution says that not fewer than 1,500 citizens may bring an initiative to abolish the monarchy. If the people carry it, parliament must draft a republican constitution and put that to a second vote between one and two years later. Article 4 goes further still and lets any of the eleven municipalities vote to secede from the state. There is also a route by which 1,500 citizens can move no confidence in the Prince himself, though the motion is then decided by the Princely House under its own house law, which is the clause the critics point at. In a country of about 40,000 people, 1,500 signatures is not a high wall. Hans-Adam's argument, made at length then and in a book afterwards, was that a hereditary head of state removable by petition is more accountable than an elected one nobody can touch between elections.

The bargain was legible on its face: more power for the Prince, and a constitutional off-switch for the voters. No European monarchy had written both halves into the same document before, and none has since.

The objection from Strasbourg

The Council of Europe's Venice Commission examined the package and published its opinion in December 2002, three months before the vote. Its conclusion was that the amendments were not compatible with European democratic standards — that they concentrated authority in an unelected office to a degree with no parallel among the continent's monarchies, and that the new popular rights did not offset the concentration, because an instrument you must effectively stage a constitutional crisis to operate is not a check in any ordinary working sense. The Landtag, Liechtenstein's own parliament, had resisted the same proposals for years. None of it moved the electorate. Two-thirds of the people who turned out preferred the arrangement they had grown up inside to the one recommended from outside, and the amendments took effect. On 15 August 2004 Hans-Adam handed the day-to-day exercise of his powers to his son Alois, remaining head of state himself.

The second vote

The powers were tested in 2011, when a citizens' initiative proposed decriminalising abortion in the first twelve weeks. Before the country voted, Alois announced that he would refuse his assent whatever the result. The initiative was narrowly defeated — 52.3 per cent against — and the pre-announced veto became the issue in its own right. A campaign group put a further initiative to the country to remove the Prince's power to block the outcome of a referendum. On 1 July 2012 it was rejected by 76.1 per cent, on a turnout above eighty per cent. Alois had said he would step back from public duties if it passed. The country had now been asked twice, the second time in plainer language than the first, and it answered more emphatically than before.

Who the electorate is

One further number belongs beside those two. Liechtenstein was the last country in Europe to give women the vote, and it did so on 1 July 1984 by a margin of 119 ballots — 2,370 to 2,251, decided by an all-male electorate at the third attempt, after defeats in 1971 and 1973. Three municipalities withheld the local franchise until 1986. The same machinery of direct democracy that has twice confirmed the Prince's powers is the machinery that kept half the adult population out of the polling station until 1984. Neither fact explains the other, and both belong in any honest account of how this state decides things: 1,000 signatures put an ordinary law to the country, 1,500 a constitutional amendment, and the same 1,500 could in principle end the monarchy next year.

You can read the arrangement off the Städtle in Vaduz without being told any of it. The castle sits on the terrace above the town, lived in, unvisitable, with no ticket office and no tour, and it looks down on a parliament building finished in 2008 that attracts a fraction of the attention. Once a year, on 15 August, the garden opens and the whole country is invited up; the Prince speaks, the crowd applauds or does not, and there are fireworks over the Rhine afterwards. It is a modest ceremony for a live constitutional question. Most of the adults standing in that garden have voted at least once on how much power the man giving the speech should hold, and twice now the answer has come back: more than anyone else in Europe.