Switzerland Today

Dear Swiss Abroad,

For anyone thinking about a name change, your moment may be on its way. The news that the government backs a proposal for married couples to freely choose what they call themselves has created some buzz on our website. As someone who has wrestled with two surnames without a hyphen for more than a decade, I can appreciate all the fuss.

For some more name games and news, check out today’s briefing.

© Keystone / Anthony Anex

In the News: a winning documentary, optimism on EU negotiations, and a space mission named Lisa.

• The documentary Die Anhörung (the Hearing) by Lisa Gerig won Switzerland’s most prestigious film prize at the Solothurn film festival, worth CHF60,000 ($70,000). The film shows how the asylum hearings at the State Secretariat for Migration take place and how the interviewees experience them.
• EU ambassador to Switzerland Petros Mavromichalis expressed confidence that the two parties will be able to make headway on a new agreement. He told Bloomberg that the Swiss government is on board, it just needs to convince voters.
• Swiss Environment Minister Albert Rösti defended wolf culling to protect people and livestock. Since the revised hunting law was introduced in December, 32 wolves have been killed. He said that although there have been less attacks on livestock lately, there was still a need for protective measures.
• The “Lisa” space mission to research gravitational waves in space, which has Swiss involvement, was officially been given the green light. Some 120 research institutions are involved including ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich.

Gaetan Bally

Many names but not one fit for a CEO. Swiss pharmaceutical supplier Lonza can’t seem to find a suitable chief.

It’s that time of year when the CEOs put on a brave face and talk about their annual results. What happens though if you can’t seem to find a CEO? This is the problem facing Lonza – the world’s largest pharmaceutical supplier, which many people got to know during Covid because it was producing the Moderna vaccine.

Today the Tages-Anzeiger reported that the company just can’t seem to hold down a CEO. “Three times in a row, the company was unable to fill the position,” wrote the paper. First there was Richard Ridinger and then Marc Funk who lasted nine months and then, Pierre-Alain Ruffieux. It’s hard to keep the names straight.

What could be the problem? When the company was in a hiring surge during the Covid pandemic, there was a lot of talk about the challenge of convincing people to move to the company’s headquarters in Visp, which is far from Zurich, Basel or other big cities.

But Tages-Anzeiger suggests another possible reasonExternal link. There’s suspicion that the company’s chairman, Albert Baehny, who has been the only constant at the company, is struggling to let go of the company. Or perhaps, he just doesn’t want to let it fall into the wrong hands.

Keystone / Martin Ruetschi

Sharing a name but not Swiss citizenship. How one Russian man is trying to make the case to stay in Switzerland.

Leonhard Euler may not be a household name, but he is considered one of the fathers of modern mathematics. He was also born in Basel and a Swiss citizen who also was one of the faces on the CHF10 bill. He died in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1783.

More than 200 years later, one of his descendants, Alexander Euler fled Russia shortly after Vladimir Putin’s mobilised the army in September 2022 to attack Ukraine. He came to Switzerland and submitted a request for asylum.  

As Swiss public television SRF reported, Euler’s request has been rejected. Swiss authorities argue that it isn’t possible to assess whether the punishment for conscientious objection to military service in Russia is disproportionate or inhumane.

Euler isn’t giving up though. He hopes to be able to stay in Switzerland by getting Swiss citizenship given his ancestry. He is not the first person in the Euler family to fight to stay in Switzerland.

After the Russia revolution in 1917, several of Leonhard Euler’s descendants fled the country and were able to secure citizenship in Switzerland. However, things changed around the 1950s. Since then, you lost your Swiss citizenship if you had another citizenship and were born abroad unless you submitted a special request before the age of 22. His father didn’t do this before the deadline.

Regardless of the final asylum decision, he has no plans to serve on the front line: “If I have to go back to Russia, I won’t join the Russian army. I’d rather go to prison than to war!”