Swiss foreign ministry backtracks on embassy closures
The city of Chengdu in southwestern China.
Keystone / How Hwee Young
The planned closures of the embassy in Bolivia and the Consulate General in Chengdu, China have been avoided thanks to savings elsewhere, the ministry has confirmed.
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Keystone-SDA
Under cost-cutting targets revealed last year, the embassy in La Paz would have had to shut in summer 2024, while the representation in Chengdu was due to shut at the end of 2023.
The plans were reported by the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper last summer, and confirmed by the foreign ministry at the time.
However, both representations are still listed in the recently published Swiss Foreign Policy Strategy 2024-2027.
In response to an enquiry about this by the Keystone-SDA news agency, the foreign ministry said the external network is of central importance for Switzerland and the global representation of its interests; closures are generally the last-resort option.
And thanks to intensified cost-cutting efforts at the head office, it has so far been possible to implement savings targets without the planned closures, the foreign ministry said.
The plans from the beginning of 2023 contained a goal for the ministry to save some CHF64 million ($73.14 million).
According to foreign ministry figures from last summer, the costs to maintain the more than 160 Swiss representations abroad totalled around CHF500 million per year.
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