Switzerland Today
Hello from Bern, where the month of June has been the second-hottest since records began in 1864, Swiss weather forecasters said today. If only the summer heat could be stored for the winter ahead…
In the news: energy worries, e-ID round two, and Credit Suisse again.
- The government today outlined plans to address a possible shortage of gas supplies this winter, saying it could resort to rationing if other measures are insufficient. The plan involves beefing up supplies from neighbouring countries like Germany and France, while also encouraging industry and private households to cut down on gas usage. Gas accounts for around 15% of total energy consumption in Switzerland.
- The government also presented plans for the introduction of a digital identity for citizens to facilitate administrative processes. The e-ID would remain optional and free of charge, and citizens would continue to be hold analogue versions of ID cards, Justice Minister Karin Keller-Sutter said on Wednesday. Voters last year rejected a proposed law for another electronic identity system, mainly due to fears about data protection.
- Credit Suisse said todayit will no longer pass on negative interest charges to private clients from July 1. The decision comes two weeks after the Swiss National Bank surprised markets by raising its benchmark interest rate by half a percent (to -0.25%) in response to rising inflation. Some smaller Swiss banks have already announced an end to negative interest charges, but Credit Suisse is the first major player to make the move.
Covid comms: majority of Swiss satisfied, but not wholeheartedly.
“As quickly as possible, as slowly as necessary!” Not many soundbites stay in the memory from the government’s Covid communications over the past two years, but this one by health minister Alain Berset (about leaving the first lockdown in April 2020) is a good one. At other times, public communication was sometimes a variation between difficult-to-interpret numbers, keep-calm-and-carry-on-ism, and regularly-updated posters (in all the colours of the rainbow) outlining whatever measures were in force at the time. But it worked! At least for a small majority of the population, according to a survey published todayExternal link by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
Around 60% of respondents – more or less the same as the amount that backed the official Covid strategy in public votes – said they were satisfied with the pandemic communication, researchers found. However: of these, only 35% were “completely satisfied”; 24% added the conspiratorial-sounding caveat that they suspected other factors to be behind global events. Among the outright dissatisfied, 24% were “factually” so (i.e. rationally unhappy), while 17% were “distrustfully” so – i.e. convinced the government deliberately put out false information and that the global elite run things in secret. This latter attitude was more prevalent among older, less-educated, and rural respondents.
Drugs in Switzerland day two: Ritalin.
In yesterday’s briefing, we wrote about the doubling of opioid sales in Switzerland over the past two decades. Today, it’s the turn of Ritalin. The NZZ reports that from 2000 to 2020, consumption of the ADHD drug tripled, from 20,000 users to 60,000 (in a country of 8.5 million). What’s the cause? More recently, the pandemic may have played a role, the paper writes; home-schooled children with attention problems being sent for diagnosis or pills by stressed parents. Longer-term, some critics say, it’s a sign of the “medicalisation” and “pharmacisation” of society, of more performance pressure at school, and of insufficient therapy places for young people. That said, one of the surprising things about the increase is that it’s bigger for adults: they make up over half of all consumers, increasing by 47% since 2014 – for young people it was 19%.
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