In 2011, the general assembly decided to launch a popular initiative with the aim of reducing population growth in Switzerland. The initiative was officially declared valid on 4 December 2012. It was submitted to the voters on 30 November 2014, who rejected it. The initiative proposes to insert two articles into the Swiss Constitution
reduction of net population growth due to immigration to a maximum of 0.2% of total population per year
at least 10% of Swiss federal development aid is to be invested in programs to encourage voluntary family planning.
Throughout the 40 years of its existence the association had ostensibly been part of the ecology movement, proposing degrowth out of Malthusian concerns mostly aimed at an academic or intellectual public, and during the 1970s it explicitly denounced populist or xenophobic motivation for immigration control advocated by James Schwarzenbach. Nevertheless, in the political climate of the immigration debate in Switzerland, especially due to the proximity of Ecopop's initiative to the immigration referendum of February 2014, which resulted in widespread fears among the political and economic elite of deteriorating relations with the European Union, critics tended to accuse Ecopop or its supporters of xenophobic, racist, fascist, selfish or hypocritical motives. These attacks were mostly based on the initiative's second paragraph dedicated to global rather than national population growth, as the idea of foreign aid invested in curbing population growth in developing countries was attacked as politically incorrect and some leftist critics went as far as equating it with child euthanasia in Nazi Germany. Recommendations by parties and organisations were predominantly negative, even Green Party of Switzerland, the Green Liberal Party of Switzerland and Greenpeace Switzerland took a negative stance, as did the notoriously immigration-critical Swiss People's Party. While leftist opposition to Ecopop is mostly expressed as criticism of xenophobia, centrist and right-of-center parties oppose it because of its economic repercussions, as a cap on immigrant workers in Switzerland would deprive the economy of flexible recruitment of specialists as well as deteriorate Switzerland–European Union relations.
