Switzerland Today

Hello from Bern,

we are just over 100 days to Christmas! Doesn’t that make you dream? In the meantime, here are the latest news and stories from Switzerland on Wednesday.

Keystone/Christof Schürpf

In the news: Swiss banks, a Swiss NASA astrophysicist and a poll about forthcoming nationwide votes.

• A reform of the Swiss old age pension system has lost ground but is still likely to win a majority in a nationwide vote later this month, according to a new poll. Support for a proposed ban on factory farming has also fallen slightly and the initiative isn’t expected to have the upper hand. Pollsters found a striking gender gap in their survey which was published ten days ahead of vote on September 25.
• The president of the Swiss Bankers Association, Marcel Rohner, has warned of the negative impact of the high level of debt worldwide. He also lashed out against critics who suspect Swiss banks of a lack of transparency over dealings with Russian oligarchs. Rohner said the Swiss banks had done their homework and he expected other countries to do the same.
• Thomas Zurbuchen, a Swiss-American astrophysicist, says he will quit as science chief of the United States space agency (NASA) at the end of this year. He has held the senior position for worked more than six years, shepherding the agency’s about 100 space missions. The 54-year-old Zurbuchen notably oversaw the successful deployment of the James Webb space telescope and the Perseverance rover for the mission to the planet Mars.

Art museum faces criticism over Bührle art collection

The long-running controversy about the Bührle art collection at the Kunstmuseum in Zurich is a burden on Switzerland as an art centre, according to a prominent critic.

Provenance expert and lawyer Marcel Brülhart told the Tages-Anzeiger and its sister newspapers that the Kunsthaus as well as the city and the canton of Zurich have failed to manage the discussions about the about looted Nazi art properly. He described their policy as unprofessional and cowardly.

Brülhart says he has already been asked abroad whether the Kunsthaus Zurich, is an anti-Semitic museum.

The opening of an exhibition nearly 12 months ago of artworks from the Bührle collection caused protests in Switzerland and abroad.

The Swiss arms tycoon Emil Bührle is remembered more for his dealings with the Nazis than for his taste as art collector. Beginning in the 1930s, he made a sizeable part of his fortune from dealings with Hitler’s Germany.

In an interview, Brülhart criticised a planned research project to establish the origins of the artworks as an attempt to play for time.

He said the main problem was an apparent unwillingness to deal with the issue of looted art. He added that other museums in Switzerland, notably in Basel and in Bern, had acted swiftly and published suggestions in similar cases.

UN expands and shrinks in Switzerland

It is a popular and well-known fact that the Swiss city of Geneva is the European headquarters of the United Nations with numerous agencies, including the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the World Meteorolgical Organization (WMO).

Perhaps a lesser-known fact is that the Swiss capital, Bern, is the seat of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), another UN specialised agency.

Now, largely unnoticed by the Swiss media, the UN has expanded to the sunny Ticino region in southern Switzerland. To be more precise, the Swiss president, Ignazio Cassis, unveiled the UN’s Palais des Nations building in the presence of foreign diplomats last weekend.

That is, it is a model of the Geneva building in Switzerland’s largest open-air museum at Melide on the shores of Lake Lugano.

The miniature model might only reach up to the elbow but there is a long story behind it: The inauguration marks the 20^th anniversary of Switzerland’s membership in the UN. It took decades of national debates for the country to join the world body in 2002.