Switzerland Today

Greetings from Bern,

There is a public elevator in the heart of the Swiss capital that takes riders to the lower old town where the River Aare flows. Tourists have no idea they have to pay a small fee (CHF1.50) for this ride until they alight and stumble upon the cash booth. The other day two American tourists were valiantly trying to pay via a QR code while the intransigent cashier demanded the money owed in the local dialect. Until a Swiss woman quietly intervened and offered up her Swiss coins. “My gift”, she said in perfect English.

Sometimes locals and tourists can co-exist, and sometimes it’s all-out war, as we find out in today’s briefing.

Keystone / Patrick Straub

In the news: Swiss people feel old only from the age of 80, new campaign targets cyber sex crimes against minors, top CEOs earn 143 times more than lowest-paid staff, and Zurich researchers operate on a pig 9,300km away.

• The Swiss perceive “old age” to start at their 80th birthday, a more optimistic assessment than in previous decades. In the 1990s they felt the final stage of life started at 69, surveys reveal.
• Child Protection Switzerland has launched a campaign to protect children and young people from sexual crimes committed online.
• Last year, Switzerland’s top managers earned on average 143 times more than their lowest-paid employees, according to a study by the trade union Unia. Vasant Narasimhan from Novartis (pictured), for example, earned CHF16.2 million.
• Swiss researchers have operated on a pig in Hong Kong from their laboratory at the federal technology institute ETH Zurich, the first time that a magnetic stomach tube developed for this purpose has been used remotely on a living animal.

Keystone / Alessandro Della Valle

What’s that on your plate – and in your glass?

If you thought that was a quality Swiss wine you were sipping at dinner last night, think again. A wine producer, Cédric Flaction, went on trialExternal link in the city of Sion today, accused of selling wine under the AOC Valais label that did not actually originate from that canton – to the tune of some CHF12 million.

The public prosecutor alleges that, between 2009 and 2016, Flaction falsified invoices and accounting to hide the fact that he’d bought hundreds of thousands of litres of Spanish wine and wine from Schaffhausen in northern Switzerland to pass off as a Valais product. Among his customers were heavyweights in the wine distribution sector like Mövenpick.

Flaction’s actions, the prosecutor said in the indictment, allowed him “to obtain an illicit advantage and to enrich himself illegally”.

Whatever the outcome of the trial, Valais wine producers and sellers say the damage to their image is already done, Swiss public radio RTS reports. The president of the Swiss association of wine producers, Claude Crittin, calls the affair unfair competition against other producers “who work properly under Swiss conditions”.

“You have to be particularly devious to pull off an operation like this”, Crittin tells RTS.

Authorities uncovered the massive fraud after the wine-inspection system was updated in 2016 to allow for the exchange of information between different state bodies. Today the Swiss body in charge of wine inspection says it checks up to 1,200 businesses each year.

If that’s not enough to make consumers seethe, here’s another “non-Swiss” product on the dinner table to watch out for. Over at the consumer showExternal link Espresso on Swiss public television SRF, a woman sent this complaint: the major supermarket chain Coop was advertising minced beef on sale by using the term “Swiss guarantee”, when in fact the product contained meat from Austria and Germany. Assembly took place in Switzerland, according to the package label, but for the customer who brought the complaint, “it was a really deceptive package”.

The law around labelling products as “Swiss” is stringent – in the case of meat, the animal must have spent most of its life in Switzerland, according to SRF. But since this rule applies only to product packaging, Coop didn’t actually break any laws by advertising the meat as Swiss in its promotional flyer and on store signage.

By way of explanation, the retailer said it prepares its advertising campaigns well in advance. Although the plan was to sell Swiss minced beef, in the end there was a shortage of the product, but the flyers and signs had already been printed. When asked why the stores did not at least change the wording on the store signs, Coop – wait for it – did not respond.

Keystone / Christian Beutler

Is Zermatt planning a tourist tax for day-trippers?

School holidays may be over in Switzerland, but for foreign visitors, summer is still in full swing. I know this not by the average temperature in Bern (a mild 21°C today) but by the number of carefree tourists the bus driver just manages to skirt on the route that cuts through the capital’s scenic old town.

As I sit on that bus several times a week, in recent days I’ve been asking myself at what point a destination can claim it’s suffering from “overtourism”. You know the term: it’s been making waves this year. To much fanfare Venice, the poster child of tourism gone mad, introduced a €5 (CHF4.70) levy on day-trippers in an effort to discourage mass tourism that brings in little revenue for local businesses.

Reporters at Swiss public radio SRF say that the Swiss resort of Zermatt is now consideringExternal link a similar tax. According to documents they’ve seen, the idea would be to impose a CHF12 fee on day visitors, equivalent to what someone spending three nights in a hotel or holiday flat pays in tourist tax.

The revenue from this tax would then go to the town’s sustainability fund, which is why they are workshopping the term “Green Tag” or green label, SRF reports. It’s being floated as a solution after locals complained about the high number of visitors, many attracted by the photogenic Matterhorn peak.

The idea, of course, is not new in Switzerland. This spring we reported on Lauterbrunnen, a picturesque valley in the Bernese Oberland, flirting with introducing a tax on day-trippers. Tiny Iseltwald on Lake Brienz imposed a “selfie tax” in 2023 to cope with the influx of enthusiastic fans of a South Korean television show shot in the village.

Back in Bern, seeing tourists strolling down the middle of the street, their backs to an oncoming bus, is a small irritation that’s all forgotten when I see them going selfie-mad in front of the famous Zytglogge clocktower, grinning ear-to-ear the way only people on holiday can.