Switzerland Today
Greetings from Bern,
The Swiss love voting. They’ll be heading to the polls on Sunday in fact. The residents of the small town of Moutier love voting so much they even voted on switching cantons twice! Mind you, that was because the first result was nixed after reports of “irregularities” (so-called electoral tourists entering the town to vote illegally). The second vote earlier this year eventually confirmed that the townsfolk of Moutier really did want to leave Bern and join Jura. Read about the latest development below.
In the News: The EU says non-EU Switzerland needs to cough up more dosh before high-level talks resume to sort out strained relations.
- Switzerland says it should be the other way round, pointing out it’s already made significant investments in the EU, including more than CHF20 billion to build the New Rail Link through the Alps, which it says benefits all of Europe. “Once meetings are organised, we can put on the table everything that we’ve done in favour of the European Union,” said Guy Parmelin (pictured), who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year, at the UN general assembly in New York.
- The Swiss National Bank (SNB) today bucked the trend set by its central bank counterparts in Frankfurt and Washington and kept its foot on the cheap money pedal as it cut its forecast for Switzerland’s post-pandemic recovery. Tepid inflation and a Swiss franc which remained “highly valued” ensured the SNB kept its policy interest rate of minus 0.75% and a commitment to foreign currency interventions, as expected. “If you’re looking for policy action, you’ve come to the wrong place,” said one economist.
- One in six children or adolescents in Switzerland is overweight, with those of foreigners and uneducated parents most at risk. While 13.2% of the 29,000 children analysed by the organisation Health Promotion SwitzerlandExternal link were considered overweight, 4% were “seriously overweight”. These figures have dropped slightly over the past ten years.
On Sunday the humanitarian charity Swiss Solidarity turns 75. Since its first appeal on September 26, 1946, it has collected almost CHF2 billion ($2.15 billion) in donations and supported over 5,000 projects.
That appeal on Swiss public radio, RTS, was for children suffering from the consequences of the Second World War. Swiss Solidarity initially collected in-kind donations (not money). Since then, it has carried out 257 collections and financed 5,097 projects: 1,525 in Switzerland, 755 in Europe, 787 in Africa, 746 in Asia, 753 in Latin America, 528 in the Near and Middle East and two in the South Pacific.
The largest collection took place in 2004/05 after the tsunami in South-East Asia, when CHF277 million was collected. The picture shows then-president Simonetta Sommaruga working the phones and taking donations in 2015.
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It’s the nearest Switzerland has come in recent years to civil war, but there’s finally light at the end of the tunnel.
The cantons of Bern and Jura have signed a road map on the politically delicate issue of how the town of Moutier will move from canton Bern to neighbouring canton Jura. The aim is for the switch to take place by 2026 at the latest.
After decades of separatist activism, voters said they wanted to change allegiance in 2017, but the Bernese authorities declared the result null and void, citing irregularities and accusations of “electoral tourism”. In an unprecedented second vote earlier this year almost 55% of voters confirmed that they really did want to leave Bern.
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