🧀 Safe as Helvetica Cheese

Asked this autumn whether they feel safe, 96% of Swiss residents said fairly or completely, and so did 95% of business leaders, which is about as close to unanimity as a country with four languages ever gets. Bern's spies disagree. The Federal Intelligence Service has spent the year warning that the country's security has clearly deteriorated, with Russia's hybrid war on Europe at the top of its list. So the Federal Council, the seven-member government, asked parliament to raise VAT, now 8.1%, to fill a new armaments fund. The Council of States, the upper house, shaved the increase from 0.5 to 0.2 points this autumn. The National Council, the lower house, votes next. Then comes a referendum that needs a majority of voters and of the 26 cantons, probably in 2028.

The calm is not stupid. The last war fought on Swiss soil was the Sonderbund, a 26-day civil war in 1847. But the next blow does not need tanks. In late September hackers got into PK Softech, a small software firm in Reinach, outside Basel, which serves Publica, the pension fund of federal staff, with just under CHF45B in assets. Records on possibly more than 100,000 members of a dozen pension funds walked out, and intelligence staff posted abroad may be among them. Another client, the City of Zurich's pension fund, had apparently been testing the software with real member records. Test files are supposed to be fake, which is, I mean, the entire point of a dry run. No VAT point would have caught that. Attention is free, and Zurich skipped it.

Washington slapped a 39% tariff on Swiss goods in 2025, and Bern spent months negotiating it down to 15%. The F-35, approved by Swiss voters in 2020 with 50.1%, came with a "fixed price" that turned out to be fixed the way a restaurant's market price is fixed: up to CHF1.3B extra, by Bern's own count. And the Patriot batteries Switzerland ordered slid down the queue when Washington put Ukraine first. Allies invoice, and allies reschedule. (Picture Congress putting the F-35 to a public vote. Picture anyone in Washington accepting a 50.1% result without a lawsuit.)

Look, the voters are not wrong to be stingy. In a poll early this year, three quarters opposed the original 0.8-point hike, and two thirds doubted the army would spend extra money well. That is a healthy instinct in a democracy that signs its own cheques. Berlin, facing the same bill in 2025, rewrote its constitutional debt brake so that defence spending above 1% of GDP could go on the national credit card. Bern is asking shoppers for 0.2 points at the till, and asking them first. But Switzerland still has a shelter place for nearly every resident, dug by a generation that did not feel safe at all. Their grandchildren sleep well. That was the whole idea of the concrete.