Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
“If you cannot think of anything appropriate to say, you will please restrict your remarks to the weather.” I was a teenager when I first heard this line in the film adaptation of a Jane Austen novel – and it haunts me every time I make a comment about the weather.
Nevertheless, today’s briefing is mainly about the weather. The sweltering summer is making Europe – and Switzerland with it – break out in a sweat. It’s also causing quite a few red faces in the political arena.
Switzerland is groaning. The summer heat has the country firmly in its grip. How will this make itself felt in politics – or, more specifically, in the 2027 election year?
Eight years ago, when the federal elections followed a scorching summer, the Greens and the Liberal Greens recorded a historic gain in seats. The Greens will also want to make this a key issue in the next elections, says political scientist Michael Hermann. It is “their central political issue”.
“The other parties know that if there is more talk of climate change, this tends to help the Green parties rather than themselves,” Hermann told Swiss public broadcaster SRF. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party, for example, whose rural support base has been severely affected by the heatwave, therefore prefers to focus on issues that will help it win elections.
According to Hermann, the scorching summer of 2026 is likely to have an impact on next year’s federal elections. However, the situation is different from that of eight years ago: the two Green parties are on the defensive. “There are many other issues competing for attention. And the issue of climate change is simply no longer as fresh as it was in 2019, when we took a completely new look at it,” he says.
But it’s not only with a view to the 2027 election year that the combination of the heatwave and politics is making headlines. As the NZZ am Sonntag first reported, Environment Minister Albert Rösti from the People’s Party has cut precisely those funds from the financial planning for the coming years that were earmarked for climate-friendly reforestation of Switzerland’s forests. Yet both the House of Representatives and the Senate have repeatedly called for additional funding in recent years. However, the final word has not yet been spoken: parliament will revisit the issue of funding for the forests during the budget debate in December.
For over a week, firefighters from French-speaking Switzerland have been assisting with fire-fighting efforts in the Gironde in southwestern France. The group has now been relieved by a new team from the French-speaking cantons of Geneva, Vaud and Neuchâtel.
It had been an exhausting week, with only a few hours’ sleep a day, Nicolas Schumacher, commander of the Geneva Fire Brigade, told Swiss public broadcaster RTS. He described the feeling his team had during the first few days of the operation as “as if we were facing a veritable firestorm. […] While you’re fighting one part of the fire, all it takes is to turn round, and 400 metres further on the forest is already ablaze.”
On the ground, the new team is now fighting the flames alongside French firefighters – and the operation is likely to continue.
Switzerland has been spared from fires so far. Nevertheless, an image is circulating in the international press that illustrates the consequences of the hot summer here: the dried-up Lac des Brenets on the border of Switzerland and France. The water level is currently more than nine metres below average, with boats lying abandoned on cracked mud. The images are causing astonishment in both the US and Singapore. This is not the first time the lake’s water level has dropped drastically due to a dry spell – as early as 2018 and 2022, the boats were already stranded on dry land.
This is probably not how he imagined the weeks following the World Cup would unfold: Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s Swiss president and the most powerful man in world football, is under immense pressure following the failure of his investment plans.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen such a rapid downfall of a sports official,” Michael Payne, former head of marketing at the International Olympic Committee, told AFP. Criticism of Infantino is growing ever louder.
On Saturday UEFA, European football’s Nyon-based governing body, issued a statement in no uncertain terms: “We cannot keep going on like this with secret schemes on fast track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals and of dubious benefit to the game.” Today, Wales became the first individual football association to publicly withdraw its support for Gianni Infantino’s intended re-election as FIFA president next year. The English FA then said it would do the same.
There is currently no official rival candidate for the FIFA presidency – though Victor Montagliani, president of CONCACAF, the continental confederation covering North and Central America and the Caribbean, is rumoured to have ambitions in this regard. Apart from next year’s election, there are other ways in which the FIFA president could be ousted: a call for his resignation by the FIFA Council or a vote of no confidence by the FIFA Congress.
The coming days and weeks will show whether the most powerful man in world football can hold on to his throne. “Despite all opposition, it still seems unlikely that Infantino will relinquish his position of power of his own accord,” analyses SRF.
Translated from German, sub-edited by ts
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