Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
Switzerland - or at least the French-speaking part - is becoming more and more like France, but not necessarily for the better. As you will discover in our selection of today's news, a museum in Lausanne has just experienced the same misfortune as the Louvre in Paris.
Otherwise, everyone seems to be churning out endless statistics today. Here are the most interesting stories for you.
Enjoy the read!
One month ago, a burglary at the Louvre Museum in Paris, the world’s largest museum, made international headlines. Although not on the same scale, the Roman Museum in Lausanne has had a similar misfortune: part of its precious archaeological collection has been stolen.
The theft took place on Tuesday, shortly before closing time, when two men overpowered a guard, smashed a display case and stole several dozen ancient gold coins. The men are still on the run.
They came from a batch of Roman gold coins found in Lausanne in 1935. Dating back to the first two centuries AD, they represent the finest collection of its kind in Switzerland and one of the ten finest in the world.
As with the jewels taken from the Louvre, it is difficult to say what might happen to the stolen items. An expert interviewed by Swiss public television RTS believes that the coins are unlikely to be melted down, as this would cause them to lose more than 90% of their value. The most likely theory is that the theft was commissioned by a collector.
Some people feared that organising the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) would be a financial drain on Switzerland. But the financial results tell a very different story: the contest held in May has proven to be a real boon from an economic point of view.
Canton Basel City presented its financial accounts on Thursday that show that the Song Contest generated sales of CHF248 million for Switzerland. The show, which ended up costing CHF1.7 million less than the initial budget of CHF33.3 million, generated added value of CHF115 million, CHF53 million of which went to Basel.
The results rank the ESC as the third most successful event ever organised in Switzerland, behind the men’s European Football Championship in 2008 and the Alpine World Ski Championships in St Moritz in 2017.
But the ESC also put Basel in the spotlight. In the space of 12 months, the city was mentioned over 313,000 times in the media, mostly in a positive light. This enabled the city to position itself as a cultural and musical destination.
“I can understand English, but I prefer to answer in French to be more precise” – everyone remembers this legendary phrase by Swiss Economics Minister Guy Parmelin in 2018. Since then, his level of English seems to have improved considerably. On the other hand, the Swiss population’s English language skills progress has been more modest.
Let’s start with the good news: the level of English among young Swiss adults has risen for the first time in four years, according to the multinational EF (Education First), which assesses the English-as-a-foreign-language skills of over 2.2 million adults in 123 countries. On the whole, the Swiss are rated as “good”.
However, Switzerland does not shine in international comparison. The country only ranks 30th in the world and 22nd in Europe. The three countries holding the top three spots are, in descending order, the Netherlands, Croatia and Austria. As is often the case in this type of ranking, the Germanic and Nordic countries have a good level of English, while southern European countries are poor performers, with the exception of Portugal (6th in the world) and Romania (11th).
This difference can also be seen in Switzerland, with German-speaking Switzerland, as usual, scoring much higher than French-speaking Switzerland and Italian-speaking Ticino. According to the rankings, the canton with the best command of English is Basel City, followed by Zug and St Gallen. The three worst are Geneva, Neuchâtel and Ticino, which comes last. Finally, the EF tests show that the Swiss fare better in terms of comprehension than expression, both written and oral.
Today’s news seems to be full of rankings and statistics. We learn, for example, that the Swiss love of rail travel continues unabated. Last year, each resident travelled by train an average of 71 times, covering an average distance of 2,519 km – a new record.
Still on the subject of mobility, we also learned that the electronic motorway tax sticker is a great success. By 2025, almost half (45%) of all motorway tax discs sold will be electronic. This is a rapid increase, given that the electronic format was only officially launched on August 1, 2023.
But today’s statistics are not all positive. Two-thirds of journalists were the victims of hostile comments or gestures in 2024, according to a survey by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). Investigative journalists are the most targeted.
Children are also victims of hostility. A study by the Schwyz University of Teacher Education reveals that almost a third of children in Switzerland encounter hate speech and dangerous content online. The latest “EU Kids Online Switzerland” study, involving 1,390 young people, shows that the risks have become daily occurrences for minors, and that teenagers aged 15 to 16 are most at risk.
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