Election campaign speeches

Lots of eloquent, patriotic and clever speeches will almost certainly be made in Switzerland today. Many of them will have already been forgotten by the time you receive this magazine in a few weeks’ time. Perhaps more speeches will be made this year than usual. After all, there is an election campaign going on and Switzerland finds itself in a state of profound uncertainty.

“OECD predicts negligible growth for Switzerland,” was one headline a few days ago. Another read: “SECO lowers its projection for the Swiss economy”. Yesterday’s “20 Minuten” reported: “A foreigner enters Switzerland every 3.6 seconds.” That is 24,000 a day. The commuter newspaper “20 Minuten” has 535,000 daily readers. “Asylum chaos” and the “influx of refugees” have been reported on 210 times by Swiss newspapers over the past month. Immigration is a major issue in this election campaign. One side is calling for rigid isolationism while the other is desperately pointing to our humanitarian tradition. Everyone is aware that the issue is only going to get bigger in future. Neither border fences nor starry-eyed idealism can prevent that.

We do not cover immigration in this edition but will undoubtedly return to the issue in future. However, we have invited two foreign journalists living in Switzerland to share their views on Swiss politics and the election campaign with us in this issue. Their articles can be found on pages 8 and 9, accompanied by analysis from a Swiss political scientist.