Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
What’s the state of the nation’s soul? The short answer is that it’s melting, as very non-Alpine-feeling temperatures continue to smother the Alps. Longer-term, a statistical dissection of the Swiss psyche has been attempted by a big opinion poll released today. This and other survey results are the subject of today’s briefing.
In the news: goods moving under the Gotthard again.
- After a derailment two weeks ago led to the closure of the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the first freight trains passed through again on Wednesday morning. Capacity in the east tube of the tunnel will gradually be increased to allow some 100 goods trains to pass through each day, authorities said. Passenger trains are still diverting via the old “panorama” route.
- The government wants to explicitly anchor the principle of non-violent upbringing in the Swiss civil code, it said today. In addition to slaps and corporal punishment, the provision also concerns psychological abuse. A consultation process on the proposed measure will run for the next three months.
- As a heatwave continues to grip the country, the cantons of Geneva and Ticino have taken steps to protect construction workers. In the former, certain “heavy” tasks and roofing jobs are only possible until noon; in the latter, all construction work stops at 3pm. Current high temperatures in Switzerland are set to last until the weekend.
Survey 1: bed-sheets and best countries to live in.
In “one of the largest opinion polls ever conducted in Switzerland”, SWI swissinfo.ch’s parent company today published the results of a large-scale project called “How’s it going, Switzerland?” And it seems to being going quite well: 61% of the 57,000 respondents gave themselves a score of 8-10 on the life satisfaction scale, while over three-quarters expressed the (no doubt tested) opinion that Switzerland is “the best country in the world to live in”. If it wasn’t for lowish job satisfaction (37%), highish loneliness (one-fifth), and money worries (one-third), it would be paradise.
Input from the Swiss Abroad meanwhile threw up some interesting discrepancies. Only half of them think Switzerland is the best country in the world to live in (the half dragged abroad by their partner?). And on average, Swiss people who have left the homeland or grown up elsewhere claim to feel less anxious, calmer, and less depressed than their Swiss-based kinfolk. But the most fascinating and surely most irrelevant contrast between Swiss-based folk and emigrants: people here change their bedsheets on average once a month; the Swiss Abroad do it every week.
Survey 2: hard workers or industrious complainers?
One of the key points of the survey above was the fact that Swiss satisfaction is built on private life, rather than work, where most people spend most of their day. What’s driving this? Luckily, another survey published yesterday can help. A large-scale Europe-wide comparison showed that Swiss employees (based on a sample size of 1,224) are more likely than in other countries to complain about the pace and pressure of work; they are also more likely to say that work often eats into their source of satisfaction, i.e. their private lives. A third said they were physically or psychologically exhausted at work.
However, as is often the case in Switzerland, the problems are relative: overall, employees came out of the survey better than their European counterparts regarding health effects of work, as well as career opportunities, decision-making freedom and support from bosses. Even the exhaustion figure was below the European average. And contrary to the claims of a well-marketed survey about “bullshit jobs” a few weeks ago (which was based purely on US responses), the latest figures show that 91% of Swiss see their work as meaningful – three percentage points higher than in other European countries.
Survey 3: two months from elections, polls tell us what to expect.
Traditionally, of course, opinion polls were less interested in the bed-sheets and gripes of the masses and more in who they planned to vote for. Also here we’re not disappointed today: the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) presentsExternal link an overview of intentions ahead of Swiss parliamentary elections on October 22. While the polling figures presented by the paper are not new, it performs the service of aggregating the data from the two biggest surveys carried out in the country: Tamedia and 20 Minuten’s (done by the Leewas firm) and the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation’s electoral barometer (by Sotomo).
Ultimately, the NZZ writes, the situation looks as if it will favour the right-wing People’s Party, who may well record one of the best results of their history; the Greens, after gains in 2019, are heading for losses, as are the Liberal Greens. The Social Democrats, Radical-Liberals, and the Centre Party are hovering in their usual territory of 14-17% of the vote. Two months out from election day, can anything tip the scales and upset the poll predictions? The question of whether voters go with their heads or with their hearts could be decisive, the paper writes. But this is more difficult to predict.
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