Swiss foreign ministry backtracks on embassy closures
The planned closures of the embassy in Bolivia and the Consulate General in Chengdu, China have been avoided thanks to savings elsewhere, the ministry has confirmed.
Under cost-cutting targets revealed last year, the embassy in La Paz would have had to shut in summer 2024, while the representation in Chengdu was due to shut at the end of 2023.
The plans were reported by the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper last summer, and confirmed by the foreign ministry at the time.
+ From July 2023: Bolivia embassy faces closure due to cost-cuts
However, both representations are still listed in the recently published Swiss Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-2027.
In response to an enquiry about this by the Keystone-SDA news agency, the foreign ministry said the external network is of central importance for Switzerland and the global representation of its interests; closures are generally the last-resort option.
And thanks to intensified cost-cutting efforts at the head office, it has so far been possible to implement savings targets without the planned closures, the foreign ministry said.
+ Read more: foreign ministry savings raise fears among Swiss Abroad
The plans from the beginning of 2023 contained a goal for the ministry to save some CHF64 million ($73.14 million).
According to foreign ministry figures from last summer, the costs to maintain the more than 160 Swiss representations abroad totalled around CHF500 million per year.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
External Content
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
Almost finished… We need to confirm your email address. To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.