Switzerland Today
Hello from Bern,
Where the capital city’s carnival is kicking off this week, with the main parade scheduled for Saturday. Yesterday, Lucerne’s “Fasnacht” finished with a bang (photo above). Basel’s carnival, the biggest in the country, will start on Monday.
In the news: funding for Ukraine, Covid coverage, and carnival capers.
- The Swiss government (in photo: Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis, left, and Interior Minister Alain Berset) is seeking parliamentary approval to send CHF140 million ($151 million) in further humanitarian aid to Ukraine and Moldova, it said today. Since the war broke out last year, Bern has allocated CHF1.3 billion for supporting Ukraine, including CHF270 million to help people in the country and CHF1.03 billion to support Ukrainians who have fled to Switzerland.
- Almost half of all articles published in Swiss media during the first 18 months of the Covid-19 pandemic focused on the virus, according to a study by the universities of Lucerne and Bern. In the first weeks of the lockdown, the proportion of Covid-related coverage even reached 60-65%. Researchers also said there were few empirical grounds for criticism accusing media of “providing platforms to the wrong voices”.
- Thousands of people attended the final night of Lucerne’s carnival on Tuesday, marking the end of a successful and sunny 2023 edition. The two other big carnival processions in Lucerne attracted 45,000 and 60,000 people on Thursday and Monday respectively, an all-time record. From Monday the people of Basel will be celebrating their three-day carnival, the largest in Switzerland.
Swiss arms exports: if the law doesn’t work, change it!
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, strict rules banning the re-export of Swiss arms to war zones have come under pressure. And politicians in Bern, who voted for the rules just a few months before the war began, are now hectically rethinking. Various ideas have been floated about how and when to allow such deliveries to (for example) Ukraine, causing divisions among hardcore neutrality supporters and the more compromise-minded.
The latest idea came out of a security policy committee in parliament on Tuesday: under the proposal, the Swiss government would have the power – still under strict conditions – to limit the re-export ban to five years. Weapons could also be re-exported to a war zone if the country in question was engaged in self-defence and if the UN had declared a violation of international law – a clear hat-tip to Ukraine, which is obviously driving the debate.
What’s the chance of the plan passing into law? It’s still early stages: a sister committee in the Senate would have to approve the idea, before also a majority of both houses. The idea could have legs: it’s provisionally backed by a bloc driven by the centre-right Radical-Liberals and the left-wing Social Democrats (who yesterday “freed themselves from the utopian programme of their party”, according to the tongue-in-cheek NZZ newspaper).
However, with the country’s biggest group – the right-wing People’s Party – and the Greens both against such a plan, getting enough support in parliament is not a given. Especially in an election year, debates might be less open to compromise. Votes from the Centre Party would be (as often) decisive. And with the speed things move in Swiss politics, the war in Ukraine might be (optimistically) over by the time the law is passed.
Cheese ranking: in the nose of the beholder
Swiss public broadcaster, SRF, was a bit hot and botheredExternal link this morning about a ranking by a food website. Only three Swiss cheese types make it into the top 50 published by “tasteatlas”, SRF writes: the ranking is dominated by Italian types, and “even” cheeses from Poland, Brazil, or Portugal beat out the Swiss specialities. “Has the world lost its appetite for our national product?” it wonders.
An important question! But perhaps also important, when deciding to ask such a question, would surely be to wonder: “what is tasteatlas, and how does it come up with its ranking?” A quick look at the site shows that its methodology has nothing to do with expert judgements, weighted/representative surveys, or even, God forbid, concrete statistics about cheese sales around the world; the site is rather an aggregate of ratings left by its users.
This means that the ranking, rather than being that of the “best” cheeses in the world, as SRF writes, is an arguably somewhat arbitrary list of the “best-rated” (tasteatlas’ wording) cheeses in the world, according to the people who use that particular website. French public broadcaster TF1, which poked a little deeper, found that the number of ratings taken into account for the cheese ranking was 28,371 – but from which countries these came from is unknown.
This journalist is not trying to stick up for the qualities of Swiss cheese (the official world cheese awards, where Swiss cheese is very much at the top of the pile, can do that). He’s also not launching an attack against the potential of hive intelligence and online surveys (it would a bit late to start doing that in 2023). But it would be nice to be clear about what we’re talking about.
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