Why is it the foreign press find Swiss elections such a bore, if they get a mention at all?

While the rest of the world watches on as the United Kingdom endeavours to extrapolate itself the European Union and attempts are made to impeach President Trump, no-one outside Switzerland appears interested in the general elections which took place here yesterday.

As to why this is the case, a journalist of the Zuger Zeitung endeavoured to find out. While neighbouring Austria has a similar population of 8.8 million and the national language is also German, there was far more interest worldwide in their recent elections than in the ones held here.

It was reported how national German newspapers and journals such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel covered speeches and talks delivered by previous (and since re-elected) chancellor of Austria, Sebastian Kurz. “But who (outside Switzerland) is reporting on what Albert Rösti, the leader of Switzerland’s biggest party (the SVP) has been saying?” the journalist asked. Well, at least the Constance local newspaper the Südkurier is.

Of course, prior to the elections in Austria, there was the scandal which sparked them off in the first place, namely a secretly recorded video in a villa in Ibiza which cause the coalition government in Vienna to fall. “One would have thought, with Switzerland being much more a financial heavyweight than Austria, more would have been reported about its elections abroad,” he wrote.

And it is not that individual Swiss referendums are ignored, the one about whether cows should be able to keep their horns leaving the British Guardian newspaper to write that “Swiss voters were ready to take the cow by the horns”, the New York Times Magazine also reporting on the Basic Income For All referendum here (which failed), while elections in Switzerland do not really feature in the New York Times at all.

Is Switzerland really so boring?

One person who should know is Johannes Ritter, the Swiss correspondent of the German national daily Frankfurter Allemeine Zeitung. When he was asked how he would rate the excitement of Swiss elections on a scale from one to ten, he replied “between two and three”. “Basically,” he said, “there is an interest on the part of our readers about news about Switzerland as can be seen by the number of clicks my articles get online. The thing is, if elections do not really knock anyone off their perches, and the government remains much as it was before, no-one is interested.”

Does it therefore take a scandal to spark interest in elections as in Austria?

The journalist concluded by saying that, if Petra Gössi, the leader of the national FDP party, had moved into a house next door to Christoph Blocher, a former leader of the SVP party and member of the Federal council, in Herrliberg, an upmarket area of Zurich, and planted a few flowers there (in reference to a row between two senior bankers which dominated Swiss news of late), more would have been written abroad about the elections held here.