Does Switzerland have fewer police than neighbouring countries?
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Increase the number of railway police (currently 300), check people at station entrances, reintroduce conductors on regional trains, introduce a wide range of technology: after the attack on Saturday there is no shortage of ideas on how to increase security. Pierre Maudet, the Geneva councillor in charge of cantonal security, told Swiss public radio, RTS,…
As Switzerland ages, the pension system gets stretched
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2016 is an important year for the future of the Swiss old age insurance scheme. Parliament is in the midst of discussing the “Retirement 2020” project, and at the end of September, voters will have their say on a people’s initiative that would require a 10% increase in the amount that pensioners receive from the…
Does Switzerland really have the best public services in the world?
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Swiss Transport Minister Doris Leuthard claims that no other country in the world has public services as good as the ones in Switzerland.
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The issue of parliamentarians’ salaries and how they make a living is a regular talking point. Recently, Zug senator Joachim Eder suggested that parliamentarians should no longer be paid an accommodation allowance if they are not actually away from home when they are attending a legislative session. A few months earlier, parliamentarian Hans Grunder filed…
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Since 2008, around 50 Swiss cartoonists have presented their work as part of the exhibition GezeichnetExternal link. This year for the first time the exhibition can be seen at Bern’s Museum of CommunicationExternal link. Members of the public are invited to vote for the cartoon of the year. The exhibit will also try to break…
Have the Swiss abroad votes made all the difference?
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Rarely has a nationwide vote in Switzerland been decided by such a slim margin. On June 14, the Yes and No votes were only about 3,200 apart, less than 0.2 percentage points according to provisional final results. Without the votes of Swiss living abroad, the proposal would not have passed, it now appears from the…
‘Our job is to maintain pressure over green issues’
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Switzerland’s leftwing Green Party has two main strategies for the next legislative period: making sure the energy strategy is carried out and repairing relations between Switzerland and the European Union. swissinfo.ch spoke to party co-president, Adèle Thorens.
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The last goldmine in Switzerland closed for good in 1961, more than 50 years ago. The seam, between Astano and Sessa in Ticino, was fully depleted. Today a few hundred amateur gold panners perpetuate the tradition, primarily in the region of Napf between the cantons of Bern and Lucerne, where it is still possible to…
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Up until the 1970s there were about 50,000 members, and at the end of 2013 there were not much more than 30,000 left. We are talking primarily about the members of the Social Democratic Party, which in four decades has lost about 40% of its paid-up membership. The shrinking of the party’s grassroots seems to…
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From time to time there is talk in Switzerland about creating larger cantons. Yet such ideas never seem to gain traction.
Integration ‘not an antidote’ to Islamic extremism
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Integration, foreign policy, ethnic origin and the absence of radical preachers may play a role in helping curb Islamic extremism, as seen in Switzerland, explains a terrorism expert. But none of these factors are a real guarantee.
Swiss population getting larger, older, more diverse
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In the past 150 years, the Swiss population has tripled. Who’s contributing to the boom, and what do the country’s demographics look like today?
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In 2008, the Swiss Federal Court threw out three charges of manslaughter, murder and bodily harm against Stephan Schmidheiny.
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When the right to vote by post was introduced in 1992, there were about 14,000 members of the Swiss Abroad community who had registered with the authorities showing an active interest in votes and elections. More than a decade later, that figure has risen to more than 155,000 and in theory equals the number of…
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September 1, 1939: German soldiers invade Poland; two days later, Britain and France declare war on Germany. Thus began WWII, a conflict “infinitely more bloody and terrible” than WWI, as one Swiss paper put it.
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“If someone had told me in 1982 that the number of participants would increase tenfold in 30 years, I wouldn’t have taken them seriously,” Heinz Schild told swissinfo.ch. Schild is the founder of the Bern Grand Prix, an annual running event that takes place at the beginning of May. The ten-mile run (16km) has become…
