Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
It’s 100 years since the Swiss men’s football team achieved its best ever result in an international tournament, coming second to Uruguay in the 1924 Olympics (see photo). Is the “Nati” set to top that by becoming Euro 2024 champion in Germany? Tonight the team plays its second game, against Scotland in Cologne. A win could see it already progress to the last 16.
In the news: foreign spies, banking competition, and public media.
- Swiss Attorney General Stefan Blättler (pictured) wants to step up counterespionage efforts. Recent enquiries into the activities of an alleged Russian spy were not an isolated case, Blättler told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper today. Switzerland is reportedly a hotbed for Russian spies in Europe.
- Swiss financial regulator FINMA said today that the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS has not led to any competition concerns, despite heated debate about the size and power of the new mammoth bank. FINMA said it will continue to “closely monitor” the merger of the two entities.
- The Swiss government has reiterated its plan to lower the radio and TV licence fee from CHF335 to CHF300 by 2029. Ministers see the move as a means of taking the wind out of the sails of an even more drastic people’s initiative to cut the fee to CHF200. The proposal now goes to parliament for debate.
Youngsters: not all a bunch of hippies.
From fresh-faced idealists to old grouches: a classic political truism is that younger people are by nature more open and liberal than their conservative parents. Are they? In France, there are calls for the youth to get out and vote in force, to stop the rise of the right-wing Rassemblement National in upcoming elections. But as the Le Temps newspaper wrote yesterdayExternal link, statistics don’t show that young people in France are any less right-wing than the rest of the population. The same goes for Germany: there, the hard-right AfD has becomeExternal link the most popular party among 14-29-year-olds.
In Switzerland the trend is mixed, public broadcaster RTS reports todayExternal link. While young men (under 40) are more likely to lean right, young women tend to be more left and green; the big issue is thus a “gender divide” which is also being seen elsewhere in the world, RTS says. Various factors could be driving this, from an “anti-feminist backlash” to the rising level of education of women. One researcher told the broadcaster it’s unclear if the trend would continue in coming years, but in any case she warned against focussing on it too much. Socio-economic differences also play a big part in shaping political views, the researcher said.
Gender divides shape views on gender equality.
Different political preferences naturally imply different world views. In the case of the “gender divide”, it seems to imply different worlds altogether. Reporting on another survey published today, public broadcaster SRF writesExternal link that the sexes in Generation Z (up to 25 years old or so) have strikingly divergent views on gender equality: a majority of young women believe that equality has not been achieved in the workplace, family, politics, or business. A majority of men believe it has already been at least partially achieved in all these areas. Meanwhile, women are more prone to support LGBTQ+ issues, as well gender-neutral rights, SRF writes.
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