Switzerland Today
Hello from Bern,
Here at SWI we hope you enjoyed the holiday season, wherever and however you spent it. For the first briefing of the new year, what better than to look at a survey of Swiss expectations – positive and negative – for 2024 and beyond.
In the news: stats for 2023; and animals and fish of 2024.
- The total number of flights in and out of Switzerland’s biggest airport in Zurich increased by 14.5% in 2023 to 241,005, the AWP news agency wrote today. The busiest month was July, while the busiest day was October 6. Christmas was also chock-a-block. While activity is clearly bustling, it’s still 10% lower than in 2019, the last year before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Conservation group Pro Natura said today that the polecat (see above) was its choice as animal of the year in Switzerland for 2024. The skunk-like animal, which belongs to the marten family, is a nomad with no fixed territory, which roams the countryside at night looking for prey. Pro Natura said it was still widespread, but its preferred habitats have severely shrunk in recent decades.
- Meanwhile the marble trout was yesterday named the Fish of the Year 2024 by the Swiss Fishing Federation (FSP). The camouflaged fish has dominated the waters of southern Switzerland for thousands of years, the FSP said. Today it is only found in Lake Maggiore and a few rivers in the Bregaglia and Poschiavo valleys in canton Ticino, and is fighting for its survival.
Great expectations: what the Swiss (and a former minister) see ahead.
To mark the new year, 20 MinutesExternal link today brings some interesting stats from its “Hope Barometer” – a survey about how rosy or gloomy Swiss people see the future. What’s in store for 2024? According to the French-language newspaper, two seemingly opposing trends dominate: while the “world” (geopolitics, climate, economy etc.) is heading downhill, personal satisfaction levels are still rising: concretely, 68% think the world will be worse in 20 years, while 58% say they are rather or very satisfied with their own lives, the survey finds.
What’s going on: do the Swiss not see themselves as part of the “world”? Or do they just reckon it’s unlikely that its deterioration could affect them and their private happiness? 20 Minutes is unclear about the reasons for the “dissonance” (note that for young people, there is no dissonance: they think both the world and their own lives are going to get worse). However, in the Tages-AnzeigerExternal link, former cabinet minister Kaspar Villiger (photo above) has a possible answer: “I fear we have become a bit too comfortable in Switzerland”, he says.
But whether it’s war, viruses, or international sanctions, “everything that happens elsewhere, impacts us sooner or later”, says Villiger, a member of cabinet from 1989 to 2003. Export-oriented Switzerland will suffer from instability, protectionism and political turbulence outside its borders; while at home, the “much more polarised” Swiss politics is making it harder to reach consensus decisions, he says. Failure to see such problems can meanwhile be due to an inevitable tendency to be tricked by the “distortions of our own perceptions”.
However, the 82-year-old, who served as Defence and Finance minister in his time, still has (political) hopes: firstly, that the institutional system can withstand the test of the sharp polarisation, as it has done in the past; and secondly, that the seven members of the country’s government, who were sworn in last month, will start to listen less to the lobbying of their own parties – and concentrate more on finding a strong consensus among themselves, to the benefit of the whole country.
Cartoons of catastrophe: the best political satire of the year.
The Swiss press is well-served with many practitioners of an art form which hopefully won’t disappear in the digital age: political cartoonists. Almost all major daily papers carry satirical images with gags on everything from Swiss healthcare costs to church sexual abuse to the war in Gaza. A selection of the best cartoons of 2023 is currently running at Bern’s museum of communication; for those who can’t make it, SRF last week publishedExternal link a write up on the exhibition, while also showing us the top three cartoons of the year as selected by a jury (the winner above by Alexandre Ballaman is called “Humanitarian aid arrives gradually in Gaza”).
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