Switzerland Today
Hello from Bern,
Here are the latest news and stories from Switzerland on Wednesday!
In the news: EU Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič wants a “clear political signal” from Switzerland that it is serious about working on relations.
- Šefčovič told the Tages-Anzeiger today that the issues which prompted the Swiss to drop bilateral talks in May had “not disappeared”. The EU “did not want to be surprised again”, Šefčovič said. On Monday, he met with Swiss foreign minister Ignazio Cassis in Brussels. Another high-level meeting is planned for January 2022 around the World Economic Forum.
- The Swiss government wants to make helmets mandatory for cyclists between the ages of 12 and 16 in a bid to reduce road accidents. As a rule, cyclists in Switzerland do not have to wear helmets, unless they are using fast e-bikes. The government’s idea will go to parliament, which in 2012 rejected a proposal for mandatory helmets for those older than 14.
Polling day part 1: While the Covid law and “nursing initiative” enjoy solid support, the “judges initiative” is still less popular.
Today saw the publication of not one but two opinion polls ahead of the votes in Switzerland on November 28: one by the Gfs Bern research institute on behalf of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SWI swissinfo’s parent company), and another by the Leewas firm on behalf of Tamedia newspapers and the daily 20 Minuten. What do they find? Largely the same thing: had the votes been carried out last week, the Covid law would have been roundly accepted, the nursing initiative would have been even more roundly accepted, and the so-called “justice initiative” for drawing judges by lot would have been rejected.
They also find some similar trends. For example, voters from the right-wing People’s Party are the only ones who are against the Covid law (only 24% of them accept it, Gfs Bern finds). There’s also a generational gap: while more than three-quarters of over 65-year-olds are in favour of the Covid law, only half of 18-34-year-olds back it. Both polls also show a marked stability in opinion on the Covid law, with positions not changing much compared with previous polls a month ago: and both show the nursing initiative losing support compared to a month ago, but still enjoying a hefty lead.
However, the differences are in the details, and for readers of Swiss news this morning it might have seemed odd that while one poll shows 68% in favour of the Covid law, the other shows 61%; and while one has 72% in favour of the nurses, the other 67%. For the justice initiative meanwhile, one said it had 37% support, the other 41%. The gaps are not monumental, but why are there gaps? One obvious answer is that the polls were done at slightly different times, with Gfs Bern having an average polling day a few days earlier; they are also based on differently sized sample groups; and finally, as pollsters like to remind us, polling is not an exact science, and is based on a mixture of methods, mathematical models, and approaches. Which leads us onto…
Polling day part 2: Media including SRF have been criticised for running online polls open to manipulation.
Both SRF and Tamedia defended their respective polls after an article yesterday claimed that their surveys – at least their online, user-feedback type – are open to manipulation by bots. The article, published by the Inside Paradeplatz websiteExternal link (which specialises in finance news), tracked how an IT expert managed to completely falsify the results of a big online SRF survey a few weeks ago. With a simple script allowing him to vote as many times as he wanted (something which the SRF poll didn’t proscribe) the man managed to reverse the results for the question “are you in favour of stricter Covid-19 measures?” from 38% no, 62% yes, to 62% no, 38% yes, in the course of a night.
An embarrassment for SRF? Although the public broadcaster admits that such online polls are not representative, they have sometimes built articles – and as a result public perceptions – around the results. And so, SRF has said, there will be no more such large online surveys done, at least for the time being, until if and when they can be done more securely. Tamedia, meanwhile, who were also targeted, say they have for a long time refrained from building journalistic articles around the results of such online polls (although they do publish the results, in particular in 20 Minuten; this briefing has referred to their insights in the past).
However, as Gfs Bern’s Lukas Golder said today, the big polls – the national vote surveys which his company has been doing for decades – are not in question: the bedrock of their method is telephone calls, which are then padded out by more knowledge gleaned from online questionnaires (in the case of today’s poll for example, there were 1,215 telephone calls, and some 23,000 online). “It is not possible to manipulate our survey results,” Golder said on SRF radio. Unless, of course, an intrepid hacker was to build 1,215 robots, embed them seamlessly into society, then programme them to answer a certain way when phoned by the polling company…
A Lausanne student has managed to build – then sell – the world’s first ever USB-C iPhone X.
These days, for Apple users at least, constantly changing chargers are no longer such a problem; lighting ports have been used for a while. However, such a cable is fairly useless in most places beyond the iPhone itself, which is one reason that authorities like the EU have been fighting for a standardised charger – something Apple doesn’t want to hear about. Now, a student from the Swiss Federal Technology Institute EPFL Lausanne has taken things into his own hands, breaking apart his iPhone X and changing its innards to give it a USB-C port instead. “Two years of intense research and setbacks,” writes RTSExternal link, but worth it: Ken Pillonel sold the phone on eBay last week for CHF79,000. He has also made the details of his handiwork available onlineExternal link.
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