Restricted postal voting, US-Canada trade war, and thoughts of a Nobel scientist
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Restricted postal voting, US-Canada trade war, and thoughts of a Nobel scientist
On the day Dolly Parton was celebrating her 28th birthday – perhaps raising a glass to Jolene, which was shooting up the charts – across the Atlantic in London a future Swissinfo journalist was born. But beyond sharing a birthday, Dolly and I have very little in common. The musician, actor and philanthropist “rewrote the American dream”, said one Swiss newspaper on Tuesday, after her death aged 80. “She could unite the whole of America,” said another.
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The Supreme Court has ruled that US President Donald Trump can press ahead with his plans to restrict postal voting. “Fears of chaos are mounting,” according to one Swiss newspaper.
“In around two months, the mid-term elections for Congress will take place in the United States, and the country […] is arguing over the rules,” the Tages-Anzeiger wrote on Tuesday. “In March, Donald Trump issued new ones.” The Zurich paper explained that, by executive order, Trump had decreed that the Post Office may send out postal ballot papers only to people listed on the electoral register. These registers would be compiled by the federal authorities.
“Trump cited the desire to make the elections more secure as his reason,” the newspaper said. “Since his defeat by Joe Biden, he’s been talking about ‘electoral fraud’. He claims that, in the past, large numbers of foreign nationals took part in elections and distorted the result. This has only been proven in isolated cases. There is no evidence to suggest that ineligible voters have taken part in elections in large numbers.”
According to the Tages-Anzeiger, Trump’s opponents view his efforts to restrict postal voting and take control of elections in the states as an attempt to influence the result. “The Democratic base votes by post more frequently than the Republican base,” it said.
On Tuesday Swiss public broadcaster SRF reported that a coalition of 23 predominantly Democrat-governed states and the capital, Washington, D.C., had filed a lawsuit against this. “They argue that, under the Constitution, the states are responsible for the rules governing voter eligibility. A federal judge in Boston ruled in their favour in June. She concluded that Trump did not have the authority to alter the organisation of federal elections in this way,” it wrote. “The states also warned that changing the rules shortly before the elections could result in many people being unable to exercise their right to vote.”
On Monday the Supreme Court’s conservative majority didn’t decide the legality of Trump’s order – it ruled that states who sued did not have the legal right to challenge it.
The Tages-Anzeiger concluded by pointing out that civil rights organisations fear the government will station agents from the immigration agency ICE outside polling stations to intimidate US citizens of migrant background and deter them from voting. “Hardly anyone expects the elections to go off without a hitch – and certainly not that Trump will accept the result without complaint, whatever the outcome.”
“Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney isn’t crazy,” the Tages-Anzeiger diagnosed on Monday. “He’s doing the right thing” by standing up to Donald Trump in the escalating trade war, it said, adding that this could be a solution for other countries, too.
On Monday the Wall Street Journal reckoned Carney was “crazy as a loon if he thinks his country will prosper by distancing itself from the US”. The Tages-Anzeiger responded that Carney did indeed take a risk when he rejected the US’s terms for a deal and announced retaliatory tariffs in no uncertain terms. “The US can inflict more damage on Canada than vice versa. This applies to most countries and is the basis on which Donald Trump blackmails the world,” it said.
But the US President has been “particularly brazen” in his dealings with Canada, it said. “Since the start of his second term, he has been saying he wants to annex the country. Carney is doing something that not everyone in his position would do: he is standing up to the superpower.”
According to polls, two-thirds of Canadians support a tough stance towards the US, the Tages-Anzeiger continued. “Americans who have spent their summer holidays in Canada say they are impressed by how consistently and cheerfully US products are being boycotted there,” it said.
“Sometimes it’s not the stronger party that wins, but the more determined one. What’s more, Trump’s second term in office has so far shown that swallowing his terms is no guarantee of peace. So Carney is not crazy. He’s demonstrating to the world an alternative way of dealing with Trump.”
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) believed Trump’s hardline approach had left Carney no choice: Canada would rather suffer than capitulate, it wrote on Monday, with Carney preferring no deal with Washington than a bad one. “In doing so, he is taking major economic risks. But as the leader of the resistance against Trump, he has no other political option,” it said.
The NZZ noted that Canada exports around 70% of its goods to the United States, whereas the US sends only about 15% of its exports to Canada. Carney said Canada had been prepared to abandon its retaliatory tariffs on steel, aluminium and cars if the US were to “substantially” reduce its import duties of up to 50% in these sectors. However, Canada was not prepared to compromise “its sovereignty” or “the protection of the French language”. According to Carney, Washington had demanded, among other things, that his government curtail state support for the French language in Quebec. Carney therefore instructed his negotiators to walk away from trade talks last week.
“Other countries, including Switzerland, are likely to be watching closely to see what happens next,” the Tages-Anzeiger concluded. “At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Carney said in a widely noted speech that the US was no longer a guarantor of stability. Middle powers would have to join forces in order to survive. Now would be a good time to do so.”
It’s likely that China will overtake the United States in certain fields of science, believes Swiss Nobel laureate Kurt Wüthrich in an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ).
Wüthrich, 87, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for his groundbreaking work on determining the structure of proteins using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. For many years, he conducted his research in parallel in Zurich and at Scripps Research in California. Since 2013, he has also maintained his own research group at Shanghai Tech University in China.
“In biomedical research, China is closing the gap on the US and other countries,” Wüthrich told the NZZ on Sunday. “But they have also made quite astonishing progress in industry, for example in cancer treatment. There are new cancer drugs from China that are right up there with the best. The biggest problem at the moment is that Chinese companies are testing drugs on Chinese patient groups. The next step will be for them to also use test groups from non-Chinese populations for drug trials.”
The NZZ pointed out that, according to the Nature Index, a ranking compiled by scientific publisher Springer Nature, China is already a world leader in many specialist fields. Eight of the top ten universities in the ranking are Chinese. Has China already overtaken the US?
“I would put that into perspective, as this index only takes into account research published in the Nature journals,” Wüthrich replied. “Furthermore, these journals earn a great deal of money from advertising from China. But it is true that China is already on a par with the US in fields such as materials science. In chemistry, China is actually ahead of the US. And in biology and the life sciences, the country is catching up very quickly.”
The NZZ said that, according to an OECD report, in 2024 China spent more money on research and development than the US for the first time, when adjusted for purchasing power. Was China set to overtake the US as the leading scientific nation in the foreseeable future?
“I’m better suited to analysing historical facts than making predictions,” Wüthrich said. “But there’s now a new five-year plan in China for the years 2026 to 2030, and in this plan, funding for research and development has been dramatically increased. We’re talking about billions of dollars. However, the vast majority of these billions are being channelled into a handful of major projects. And it’s therefore likely that China will overtake the US in certain areas.”
The next edition of ‘Swiss views of US news’ will be published on Wednesday, September 2. See you then!
If you have any comments or feedback, email english@swissinfo.ch
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