Switzerland Today

Dear Swiss Abroad,

For those of you weighing up your options ahead of this October’s elections, we have just the thing today: the first instalment of a six-part series looking at each of the major Swiss political parties and what they offer at an international level.

Keystone / Str

In the news: Swiss public broadcaster back in the crosshairs.

• Campaigners handed in 128,000 signatures in Bern today demanding a reduction of the mandatory licence fee funding the public broadcaster. Currently, each household pays CHF334 ($383) per year; the initiative wants to reduce this to CHF200. Once the initiative has made its way through parliament, it will come to a public vote. A similar campaign to scrap the licence fee failed at the ballot box in 2018.
• After accusations that the national weather service tinkered with temperature forecasts, a senior meteorologist took the unusual step of apologising on television on Wednesday. He said inflated temperature predictions in southern Europe were due to faulty algorithmic models; the claims that this had been done deliberately to fan climate debates was completely untrue, he added.
• The death of a Pakistani porter on the world’s second highest mountain at the end of July “could and should have been prevented”, Evelyne Binsack told the Swiss newspaper Blick today. Binsack, the first Swiss woman to climb Mount Everest said the world’s highest mountains were becoming a “tourist Eldorado”, and that climbers were increasingly more concerned about their egos and their bucket list than anything else.

Kai Reusser / swissinfo.ch

Elections and the Swiss Abroad: what do Swiss parties propose?

Campaigning is well underway now for upcoming Swiss elections on October 22. Here in Switzerland, political profiling has even affected the weather (see above, and yesterday’s briefing). But parties are also keen to court the 200,000 Swiss voters beyond the country’s borders. What do Swiss political groups offer the Swiss Abroad? How do their international sections differ from the national parties? How are they organising for the elections?

Today, in the first of a series to be published over the coming days, we bring an overview of the international section of the biggest Swiss political grouping: the People’s Party. The head of its global chapter, founded in 1992, talks about values of “sovereignty”, citizenship rights based on jus sanguinis, and the party’s opposition when it comes to a key issue for Swiss Abroad voters: e-voting. Read the full portrait here.

Keystone / Martin Ruetschi

Workplace absences: diagnosing the disease.

Swiss employees are getting sicker, two newspapers reported last weekend. Last year, workers logged the most number of absences ever: 9.3 days for a full-time employee, an increase of 34% compared to 2019. The increase was especially acute for younger age groups, newspapers wrote. They said – but only speculated – that Covid-19 seems to have spurred greater awareness of health. Mental health problems also likely contributed.

Today, the NZZ triesExternal link to get a bit closer to the bottom of things. But concrete answers are hard to come by, it says. Statistics show that psychological problems are indeed rising, especially among younger women, but this can’t account for the whole trend. It’s also possible that the pandemic temporarily weakened many immune systems; while another non-verifiable idea is that the stigma associated with calling in sick declined due to Covid-19.

It’s a “riddle”, the paper says. One expert reckons the trend should be a temporary post-pandemic one; another expert however fears that the impact of lockdowns etc. on younger people still needs to be fully grasped. The only certainty, it seems, is that the issue is not only a Swiss one: “a similar development has also been observed in Germany and other countries”, Stefan Felder from the University of Basel told the paper.