This is part of a broader European — or more specifically, Central European — trend.
On Sunday, (March 9, 2026), Swiss citizens voted in a referendum to enshrine the right to cash in the country’s constitution. Just over 73% of voters supported the legal amendment, which the government proposed as a counter to a similar initiative by a pro-cash group called the Swiss Freedom Movement. From Politico:
The Swiss Freedom Movement triggered the national referendum after its initiative to protect cash collected more than 100,000 signatures, triggering a national referendum. Its initiative secured only 46 percent of the final vote after the government said some of the group’s proposed amendments went too far…
The Swiss Freedom Movement has previously pursued campaigns to sack unpopular government ministers, ban electronic voting, and protect citizens from professional or social retribution if they refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19 — none of which made it to the ballot box.
Switzerland’s decision to put cash into the national constitution, thus making it more difficult for future governments to abandon cash, is part of a broader European — or more specifically, Central European — trend. The first country to take the plunge was Slovakia.
In June 2023, the Robert Fico government passed an amendment to the constitution stating that “everyone has the right to make a payment for the purchase of goods and the provision of services using cash as legal tender.” The amendment also specified that cash payments can only be refused for reasonable or generally applicable reasons,” including security (e.g., risk of robbery) and technical reasons (e.g., a vending machine that does not accept cash).
The move did not go unnoticed by EU institutions, as we noted in our Jan 19, 2024 post, “ECB and EU Commission Seek to Prevent EU Member States from Constitutionally Enshrining Right to Use Cash“:
The constitutional law was unanimously adopted by the National Council of the Slovak Republic. In total, 111 of the parliament’s 150 MPs supported the amendment, reports English-language newspaper Slovak Spectator. According to the deputies, the complete abolition of cash in the future could seriously impact low-income groups as well as civil associations that finance their charitable activities from fundraising. Preserving the right to cash, they said, is also an essential step in promoting the financial literacy of the younger generation.
A Letter from Lagarde
But the new law has already run into trouble. On January 13, the European Central Bank published a letter signed by the ECB President Christine Lagarde warning that: a) it had not been consulted on the law before its passage; and b) no euro zone member has the competence to introduce such measures in the monetary policy realm. Put simply, as the letter states, rules governing the status of legal tender of euro banknotes are “an area of exclusive competence of the Union under Article 133 of the Treaty.”
In other words, national member governments of the Euro Area do not have the right to protect cash’s status as legal tender. As such, the ECB (emphasis my own) “recommends that the provisions of Article 39a… of the Constitution guaranteeing the issuance of cash as legal tender and the right to make a payments in cash should either be deleted or, alternatively, amended to merely refer to the relevant provisions of Union law” — in other words, brought back in line with EU laws on legal tender.
Since then the ECB has pledged to work together with banks, arguably the biggest enemies of cash, to ensure that communities across the Euro Area will have adequate access to cash services, bringing to mind foxes and chicken coops. The central bank has also proposed new, clearer guidelines for the mandatory acceptance of cash across the Euro Area.
That didn’t stop Hungary’s Viktor Orban government from elevating the use of cash as a constitutionally protected right, closely tied to personal freedom, privacy and social inclusion, in March last year. Hungary, unlike Slovakia, is not a member of the Euro Area, which means its government has far more leeway to take action in the monetary policy arena.
As in Slovakia, the amended legislation adopted by the Hungarian parliament imposes a general obligation on Hungarian businesses to provide a cash payment option in addition to any digital payment methods they may already offer. As CEE Legal Matters notes, by adopting this legislative package, “Hungary has assumed a distinctive position within the European legal framework by embedding the right to use cash into its constitutional order.”
More recently, Slovenia amended its constitution in December 2025 to enshrine the right to use cash for transactions, protecting financial privacy and access. As in Switzerland, the process began with a grassroots campaign and a petition supported by tens of thousands of signatures. Unlike Slovakia, Slovenia appears to have sought ECB input before passing the new legislation.
Next up could be Austria, one of Europe’s cash bastions, where politicians have been talking about constitutionally protecting physical notes and coins for the best part of a decade. But no government has yet delivered on that promise.
Cash No Longer King in Switzerland, But Still Important: SNB
Since COVID-19, cash’s role has shrunk significantly in most jurisdictions, even in cash-loving ones like Switzerland and Austria. According to the findings of the Swiss National Bank’s latest survey of people’s spending habits, conducted in late 2024, cash has already been overtaken by the debit card as the most frequently used means of payment.
Just 30% of retail transactions were settled using physical money, according to the survey. That’s down from 40% in 2020 and 70% in 2017. By contrast, some 35% of in-store transactions were settled using debit cards. Another 18% were settled using mobile payment apps and 14% via credit cards.
In terms of transaction value, the debit card already overtook cash as the payment method with the highest share for non-recurring payments some years ago, though cash is still used more often for small purchases. That being said, cash is still a very emotive issue for most Swiss citizens, reports Forbes:
[E]very [Swiss] inhabitant on average holds the equivalent of $10,481 in bills and coins. That’s the second-largest holding of all economies where the Bank for International Settlements collates data.
This was largely the result of a public backlash against the Swiss National Bank’s negative interest rate policy that ended in 2022, as customers took large quantities of their money out of bank accounts to avoid fees, and stored it in bills instead, reports Bloomberg.
The SNB’s 2024 payments survey also revealed that a clear majority of Swiss citizens (68%) would like the option of using cash to remain unchanged in the future. Despite marked differences in payment behaviour, respondents across all age groups want cash to be retained as a payment method.
Interestingly, as the following graph from Swiss Info reveals, Switzerland is now among the European countries that least use cash after being one of the biggest users less than a decade ago.
One major difference between Europe and the US, and other so-called “advanced” economies, is that cash is still the number one retail payment method in Europe, though, as the graph above, the scale of its use diverges sharply among countries.
The amount of cash in circulation in the Euro Area’s 20 member states is once again growing after “plateauing” for a couple of years (2023-2024), as the ECB reported last year. Even most 18-37 year olds in Europe increasingly see cash as a necessary fallback solution, according to the ECB’s 2024 Study on the Payment Attitudes of Consumers in the Euro Area (SPACE) report.
That said, the graph above is somewhat misleading given it does not include the old continent’s least cash-friendly countries, Sweden, Norway and the UK. But even in Sweden and Norway, efforts are underway to reverse the trend.
Authorities in Sweden, which The Economist once tipped to be cash-free by 2030, are now furiously backpedalling as concerns grow about the rampant digital fraud, exclusionary effects and security vulnerabilities that come with a cashless economy. And those security vulnerabilities are much greater today given Sweden is no longer a neutral country.
Is the future cashless? It is for Sweden, which could be completely cash-free by 2030 pic.twitter.com/BxCM4eqYBi
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 12, 2017
“Back to cash: life without money in your pocket is not the utopia Sweden hoped” https://t.co/IEqXN8kMRg
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) March 16, 2025
“Suddenly Everything Stopped”
In 2021, Norway’s central bank, Norges Bank, found in a survey that many of the country’s commercial banks were no longer accepting responsibility for providing cash services. This became a major exacerbating factor in Norway’s so-called “cash crisis” of May 2022, when card terminals across the nation went down for hours, leaving millions of people unable to transact.
The Riksbank and Norges Bank are among a number of European central banks that have in recent years advised citizens to have cash on hand in case of an emergency. As demonstrated by the nationwide blackouts in Spain and Portugal last April, while cash may not crash, bank apps, online banking in general and even ATM networks most certainly can.
From my first-hand account of that day, “Suddenly Everything Stopped…”:
People were able to ´[transact] for one simple reason: they had cash on them, or at home. Without cash, it was all but impossible to buy anything. Bank apps and online banking as a whole were inaccessible for most people most of the day, plunging the sector into paralysis. Most of the point-of-service terminals in the shops I visited were not working. Meanwhile, ATMs were also also out of order and banks had closed most of their branches for “security reasons”.
Particularly affected were young tourists who, until yesterday, were relying exclusively on their mobile payment apps and had no local network of friends or family to fall back on. My wife and I spoke to a couple of young women in their early 20s who had just arrived in Barcelona earlier that morning to spend a few days’ sightseeing and had no cash on them at all. When the power came back on in our part of the city, we saw them at the front of a long queue at an ATM.
El País spoke to a 70-year old lady in Madrid who expressed relief at sticking with her age-old habit of always carrying some cash in her wallet: “In times like these it is strategic to be old.”…
It is fear over exactly this kind of event that has prompted governments and central banks in Scandinavia to try to reverse the public mass abandonment of cash that they themselves helped set in motion many years ago. As Sweden’s Riksbank warned last year, rapid digitalisation has made payments “more vulnerable to cyber attacks and disruptions to the power grid and data communication”.
Just last week, Sweden’s central bank advised citizens to keep SEK1,000 ($110) in cash at home as part of its emergency plans in the event of payment system problems. From Bloomberg:
All Swedish adults should hold a week’s worth of cash at home so they can buy food, medicine and other essentials in case of a war or other crisis, Sweden’s central bank said.
In addition to the 1,000 kronor ($110) per adult, Swedes should also keep bank cards from multiple lenders and use the local online payment service Swish, the Riksbank said on Wednesday in its first guidance on payments aimed directly at citizens.
“The general public is an important part of Sweden’s total defense and central to strengthening national preparedness,” the central bank said. “Having access to different payment methods improves the public’s ability to make payments in the event of temporary disruptions, crises and, in the worst case, war.”
The Riksbank’s latest guidance underscores a concern increasingly shared by central banks and policymakers globally: the more societies grow dependent on digital infrastructure, the more exposed they become to systemic disruptions.
This is particularly true in times of energy shortages, crises and wars. Just last week, Iran’s targeting of commercial data centres in Bahrain and the UAE signalled a new frontier in asymmetric warfare. What happens if the data centres holding digital public infrastructure like digital identity and central bank digital currencies are also targeted in the future?
“An Important Moment”?
Back in Switzerland, the activists behind the “Cash is Freedom” campaign are generally pleased with the referendum result, according to Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS). Although their original initiative failed to achieve majority support (46%), the government’s counter-proposal was passed with ease.
“A big step has been taken” with the “yes” to the counter-proposal, said campaigner Richard Koller. The leader of the Swiss Freedom Movement spoke of a “victory”.
National Councillor Roland Rino Büchel (SVP/SG) wants to take the initiative even further and table a parliamentary intervention in the current session. It’s not enough, he said, for cash to be widely available; it must also be widely accepted, including for public services.
South African anthropologist, cash-defender and author of Cloud Money, Brett Scott, told Swissinfo before the vote that it would be an “important moment of signalling to the rest of the world” if Switzerland, one of the world’s historic financial centres, were to enshrine cash in its constitution:
Banks, he said, have promoted digital payments for decades. In this context, he adds, it is important when a country takes a clear position that it wants to protect cash.
For example, Scott explains, elderly people and people with disabilities or visual impairments depend on cash, as do people with less money, since it’s easier to keep to a tight budget with cash. On top of this, “people with low incomes often don’t trust the banking sector; middle-class people, on the other hand, tend to trust in institutions,” he says. And in general, many people have a “nostalgic attachment” to cash.
Support from various backgrounds
At the societal level, cash supporters can have very different backgrounds. Scott mentions national security experts, for example, who worry about the “serious security threat” when people don’t have access to cash. Equally critical are “libertarian communities concerned about surveillance by digital systems”, people who are against Big Tech or the financial industry, or those who want to maintain an offline life.
But many also value cash for its “informal economy element”, says Scott. “Lots of people like to preserve an informal sphere for themselves – they don’t want institutions between themselves and their life.” Collection plates in church or poker games at home would be strange without cash, Scott adds. Who wants to use a Visa card in church?
It remains to be seen whether this trend of enshrining the right to cash in national constitutions will continue to spread. Although the Swiss vote is unlikely to reverse the long-term shift towards digital payments, it does once again highlight the enduring public demand for a payment system that includes both physical and digital payment methods.
One thing is clear: with many of the world’s central banks looking to launch their own programmable digital currencies, or CBDCs, in the years ahead, with China clearly in pole position, while programmable stablecoins are already proliferating, cash will need all the protection it can get.
