This essay by Sam Jones was translated into German by our author Jean-Martin Büttner.

Computer error or not, it was the SVP’s night on Sunday.

I moved to Switzerland almost exactly four years ago. Back then, of course, it was all about the Greens.

I am shortly to be reassigned to Berlin, and so as my time as a foreign correspondent living in Switzerland draws to a close, I find myself wondering which of these two elections speaks for the country, and holds the better clues as to its future.

Across Europe, conservative populism is again on the march. Sunday’s election result here - in which 100'000 more Swiss marked their ballots for the SVP than in 2019 - is, in one sense, part of that trend.

Like its peers in Europe the SVP traffics in the same sensationalist rhetoric over immigration and political correctness. But it is very different in one key respect: it does not harbour quite the same ambition to smash the political status quo as others do.

The Greens triumphed in 2019. The SVP was resurgent in 2023. Who cares? This country’s magical political system will balance it all out.

And while the drivers of its success are obvious - inflation, the pandemic, the energy crisis and of course, illegal immigration - as an outsider, it is impossible to miss how resilient Switzerland has been in the face of these challenges.

The Switzerland the SVP’s election posters portray - a country riven by violent crime and bursting at the seams - is creation so wildly out of touch with my experience that it’s sometimes easy to forget nearly a third of Swiss believe it to be real. (These political fantasies are not merely the preserve of the right, of course. Where I live in Zürich, the left wing graffiti daubed on walls - smash capitalism! Gender is violence! - are also tone deaf to the reality of being a modern Swiss: That is, to be among the luckiest, wealthiest, safest, best educated people in the world in one of its arguably most stable and egalitarian societies.)

It is thus easy to be sanguine about the future of Switzerland. The Greens triumphed in 2019. The SVP was resurgent in 2023. Who cares? This country’s magical political system will balance it all out.

And yet. There is a kernel of something about the SVP’s enduring appeal in the face of what has happened in the last four years in Switzerland - and the last year in particular - which should give pause for thought.

On my wall hangs a small Kirchner woodcut, which I cherish: it is the image of der Briggel - a character in a short story by Jakob Bosshart, the Swiss writer. Bosshart met Kirchner in Davos. Der Briggel - seen in my picture holding a tiny owl in the small of his hand, surrounded by Swiss forest - is the tale of a mild and misunderstood stammerer, whose goodness shines as he withdraws from the world.

The picture, and the tale, spoke to me when I bought them, at a time when I too was keen for more solitude in my life (ironically, in the year before the pandemic).

But I think on some level they also reveal something in the Swiss soul. Something about retreat and disengagement. A deeply ingrained sense that freedom and peace can lie in pulling back from the world.

Switzerland’s relationship with the world around it has been a prosperous and successful one in a century of violent change. But it is worth considering whether the world’s current problems present a very new set of challenges. And whether turning away from them will continue to work.

Green Politics, Neutrality and Credit Suisse

It has become quite fashionable these days to be tired of green politics. I sympathise with this attitude. At times it can feel like the political equivalent of having a vegan to your dinner party.

When 42 per cent of Swiss voted against the climate law this June, it was a signal of such frustration. Many were simply fed up of metropolitan bien pensants like me telling them what was good for them. If I was a farmer, with a modest smallholding in the pristine Swiss countryside, who had lived my life carefully and quietly in tune with my surroundings, I too would baulk at some bike-riding smartalec from Zürich telling me my tractor must immediately be banned to save the planet.

And yet, the evidence is right there all around us, that something is going very wrong with our climate. And fossil fuels are the cause.

I have made several reporting trips to the mountains to look at the glaciers. I was in Les Diablarets this time last year, to see the Scex Rouge orphaned from the Tsanfleuron for the first time in three millenia. It was a profoundly saddening experience.

Climate change is a global issue, but Switzerland is on its front line. There is no retreat from it.

Which brings us to a second quandary. Neutrality.

The topic may not have featured heavily in campaigning ahead of the election, but Switzerland’s political place in the world is also an increasingly uncomfortable one.

«Switzerland is in the most serious crisis since the Second World War. It is confronted with what neutrality means», Scott Miller, the US ambassador in Bern told «NZZ» in March.

One may agree or not with the substance of these somewhat undiplomatic words, but Switzerland cannot pretend they have not been said, nor ignore by who. Neutrality had a function in the Cold War. But does it now? In a world where we are all daily forced to confront the moral questions of conflict and economics via our smartphones?

A situation has arisen in which Swiss politicians condemn Russian aggression and apply economic sanctions against Russia, but refuse to send even the most modest, outdated, military aid to help defend the victim of Russia’s belligerence.

The result of this muddle? Russia says Switzerland is a hostile nation and the collective West sees it as unreliable if not cowardly.

I am reminded of the apocryphal remark by Talleyrand, the master of crafty diplomacy: C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute!

The problems always lie abroad, never at home

On which note, we should probably also talk about Credit Suisse.

When I wrote about its demise earlier this year, some Swiss readers of the FT rebuked me for overstating the significance of the bank for Switzerland. The average Swiss has affection for Postbank, one wrote, but absolutely no love is lost on Credit Suisse.

Maybe so, but therein also lies a point of relevance to my theme. The great commercial motors of modern Switzerland’s prosperity are huge, global corporations.

It is a rather convenient belief to have that when these titans are succeeding, and raking in the huge profits (which help keep Swiss tax bills so low), they do so because they embody sturdy Swiss values. But when they fail, like Credit Suisse, it is because they are corrupted by aggressive foreign interests.

The very seeds of Credit Suisse’s dysfunction are arguably to be found in the tension this fallacy hides: for years it was an organisation whose management was weakened by the internal tussle between the ‘Swiss’ core of the bank and its global employees. It did not know what it wanted to be.

Does Switzerland? How long can Switzerland continue to do such a poor job regulating its businesses and pretending that the problems in them always lie abroad, and never at home?

A beautiful and prosperous country – and a prison

Paradox lies at the centre of much in politics. And where it is most glaring often seems to be fertile ground for populism.

The SVP’s success last weekend, I think, reflects an entirely understandable desire for certainty and comfort in the face of growing global challenges - and a frustration with those who have only more complexity to offer. When people are faced with a confusing world that seems hard to bear or explain, they reach for belief, said Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

On Switzerland’s 700th anniversary, in 1991, Dürrenmatt gave a now famous speech in honour of Vaclav Havel, the anti-communist dissident turned president of free Czechoslovakia.

Most Swiss, Dürrenmatt said, probably consider their country to embody Havel’s ideal republic of the free: educated, prosperous and at liberty. But Switzerland, he countered, is also a prison.

I will miss living in Switzerland greatly. But leaving, though bittersweet, also feels like a return to reality.

Dürrenmatt’s words, I think, have great pertinence.

«Because there was mayhem outside the prison and because only in prison can they be safe from attack, the Swiss feel free, freer than other people, free as prisoners in the prison of their neutrality. There is only one problem for this prison, namely that of proving that it is not a prison …»

Fehler gefunden?Jetzt melden.