Swiss foreign minister pushes back against EU ‘deadline’

Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis, in May 2020. Keystone / Peter Schneider

Switzerland will not be pressured by the European Union into premature negotiations before a political common understanding is reached, Ignazio Cassis has said.

“There are no orders given and taken between the EU and Switzerland,” Cassis told newspapers from the Tamedia group on Friday.

Specifically, he said a “deadline” for a roadmap on new negotiations was “not a topic of discussion” when he met with his EU counterpart Maroš Šefčovič earlier this week.

On Wednesday, in another interview with the Tamedia group, Šefčovič said the EU expected a calendar for substantial future negotiations to be ready by the next high-level meeting planned for the end of January at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

For his part, Cassis told the newspapers that what Šefčovič later communicated publicly had “little to do with the content of the [Monday] meeting”.

“It was never the intention of the [Swiss] government to immediately begin negotiating again after the failure of the framework agreement in May,” Cassis said, referring to the Swiss ditching of ongoing talks on an overarching treaty. Discussions are currently high level and political, and not concerned with technical details, he said.

The Swiss position is to find common ground for a solution that can “strengthen Europe”, Cassis went on. It is not about “regulating contentious details or about the Swiss uptake of European law” – i.e. issues such as salary protection, state aid rules, and citizenship law which led to the dropping of the framework accord.

“A roadmap is not on the agenda right now. It’s about seeing what expectations are present on both sides, and not losing sight of the fact that in 95% of cases, there are no divergences,” he said.

As for the EU’s expectations, these remain relatively clear, Cassis admitted. On Wednesday, Šefčovič also made this clear, stressing that the concrete questions causing dispute between the EU and Switzerland had not simply “disappeared” into thin air.