🍷 Boring Wins

In August 2025, Washington slapped a 39% tariff on Swiss goods, the steepest in the developed world, apparently to punish for a $38.3B goods surplus, which is a polite way of saying Americans like buying Swiss pharma and gold bars. Switzerland sent a winemaker to sort it out. Guy Parmelin, whose English famously runs out halfway and finishes in French, came back in November with 15%, the same rate as the EU, plus a 15% ceiling on pharma. (Fine, a delegation of Swiss billionaires also flew in to charm the president, which says plenty about trade policy now. Someone in Bern still had to write the thing.) Sure, it cost a $200B investment pledge from Swiss companies, and sure, the final text still isn't signed. Weeks earlier he had also put a free trade deal with India into force, negotiated through EFTA, with a $100B investment target over 15 years. Not bad for a man Parliament elected in 2015 mostly because nobody objected to him.

He leaves at year end, after 11 years in the Federal Council, the seven-member cabinet that runs Switzerland by committee. Parliament elects it, every major party sits in it, and the presidency rotates every January so nobody gets to become the face of anything. In that system the winning profile is the person your opponents can live with. Brilliance is a liability. A great stage presence is a warning sign. Try that hiring rule anywhere else and count who's left in the building. (Tangent I can't resist: in 1992 Parmelin backed joining the European Economic Area, the EU single market without the membership card, against Christoph Blocher, the billionaire who built the modern Swiss right. Blocher reached government too, and parliament fired him after four years for being exactly what he was: loud, brilliant, impossible. The woman who took his place held it until 2015. Her successor? A farmer from a village above Lake Geneva. Somewhere in Zurich that still stings.)

During Covid, the populist SVP, Switzerland's largest party and Parmelin's own, compared the Social Democratic health minister to a dictator. Parmelin, president that year, asked out loud whether the man really looked like one, and answered himself: not really. Debate over. Picture a Republican doing that to his base in 2021. You can't: Washington rewards the opposite, and Paris and Berlin reward whoever looks best announcing a reform, not whoever can count the votes for it. The West keeps hiring frontmen and then acting shocked when they turn out to be frontmen.

His federal pension will be CHF239K a year, which, for 11 years of being underestimated, seems cheap. The 39% lasted three months. The winemaker lasted 11 years.