Switzerland Today

Hello from Bern,

Where, not for the first time in the past 18 months, the government has broken with its tradition of making decisions only on Wednesdays – and Health Minister Alain Berset has announced more Covid rules.

Keystone / Peter Klaunzer

Papers please – new Covid entry rules

The headline decision is of direct relevance for the Swiss Abroad – or anyone planning to visit Switzerland. As of Monday, adults arriving on any means of transport who are neither vaccinated nor recently recovered from Covid will have to show a negative test result (PCR or antigen); they will then have to take another test four to seven days after arriving (cross-border workers are exempt from this). Meanwhile, all arrivals, vaccinated or not, will have to fill out a passenger locator form to help cantons track and trace, in an effort to avoid spiking infection rates after the holidays.

A second announcement is equally relevant: as of Monday, people inoculated with any of the vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) will be eligible for a Swiss Covid Certificate. This means that, say, a Swiss living abroad who has received the AstraZeneca vaccine will not be the victim of the annoying glitches reported over the past months. The decision is also good news for tourists, who will no longer be locked out of restaurants and museums because they have the “wrong” vaccine (that said, Sputnik, Sinopharm and Sinovac are still not recognised).

As for what this all means for domestic tempers in Switzerland, which flared again in Bern last night, that remains to be seen. On Friday there were few concessions to the certificate sceptics. Notably, the government has not (yet) gone back on its decision to end free tests as of October 1. While Berset said he and the other ministers would talk about the tests issue again, and that he is open to “modifications”, for the time being the goal is still to avoid the vaccinated majority of society paying the cost of tests for the unvaccinated.

Keystone / Peter Klaunzer

Blackmail – public-private problems

Health Minister Alain Berset had other worries to compartmentalise on Friday after most (in fact, all) of the major Swiss papers ran stories about an ongoing blackmail case involving him. The details were again spilled by Weltwoche magazine, which first broke the story last November. At the time, it wrote, a woman (i.e. a former lover) in possession of embarrassing photos and documents had tried to convince Berset to pay her CHF100,000 to keep quiet, before a police investigation stepped in and ordered her to keep quiet.

In a country where politician’s bedrooms are largely off limits, you might have thought this was the end of it. But Weltwoche, eager to find the public side of the private affair, now claims – based on official and possibly leaked documents – that Berset used state resources to stifle the affair. In particular, he asked his ministry’s secretary-general to look into the case, the magazine says; while an elite police unit, normally used for risky operations, was also reportedly dispatched to take the young woman into custody (a “standard procedure”, said a ministry spokeswoman).

The media will have to hold its tongue about whether it’s indeed a case of abuse of office, or rather just a highly publicised moral tale; in any case it’s politically loaded, given Berset’s portfolio and party (he is from the left-wing Social Democrats, the Weltwoche is close to the right-wing People’s Party). The first findings of an official inquiry into the authorities’ handling of the case are to be discussed by a Senate committee at the end of October.

© Keystone / Gaetan Bally

In the news – research holes, Ozone holes

• The government also said on Friday it would step in to fill holes in research funding after Switzerland lost its status as a full member of the EU’s Horizon Europe research programme. The temporary funding of around CHF290 million will go before parliament in the winter session as an addendum to the 2022 budget. The loss of access to Horizon Europe was a direct result of the Swiss abandoning of talks on a framework agreement with the EU; the government says its goal is to be reinstated as a full member.
• Three months after voters narrowly threw out a new CO2 law aiming to reduce carbon emissions, environment minister Simonetta Sommaruga announced what an alternative legislation might look like: it would have the same goal (reduce greenhouse emissions to 50% of 1990 levels by 2030) but would place the emphasis on incentives rather than higher taxes, which scuppered the previous version. “The population wants to advance in climate protection of the climate but they don’t want to feel punished by the protection measures,” Sommaruga said.

Keystone / Kevork Djansezian

Feature of the day – I just can’t get enough

Finally: from beer to wine, coffee to cigarettes, gambling to gaming, not many get through life without some sort of intoxication. Were our ancestors different? The Tages-Anzeiger writesExternal link that a new study finds evidence of alcohol consumption in China some 9,000 years ago, and that “ritual drinking probably played an integrative role in forming social relations, thereby paving the way for more complex agricultural societies to emerge”. Other studies estimate that beer is probably even older than 9,000 years, the paper writes; signs of cannabis and psychoactive drug use points to their popularity up to 4,000 years ago. Tobacco seems “new”, but that’s only because it wasn’t known in Europe until a few hundred years ago. Is SWI swissinfo.ch advocating drug use? Of course not. But if you can’t agree with your neighbour on Covid or the climate, or anything else, maybe you can share a beer.