Hospitals are under strain, intensive care units very full, some cantons are postponing operations. From 13 September, the Federal Council extends the COVID certificate requirement to restaurants, cultural and leisure venues and indoor events. Employers may use it in their protection plans. The measure is limited to 24 January 2022. Two proposals go out for […]
Alain Berset receives the presidents of women’s, men’s and equality organisations. 2021 is a year of anniversaries: 50 years of women’s suffrage, 40 years of equality in the Constitution, 25 years of the Gender Equality Act, 30 years since the first women’s strike. “Die Dinge bewegen sich.” But pay discrimination, the unequal sharing of domestic […]
Since Brexit, the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons no longer governs social security between Switzerland and the United Kingdom. On 9 September, at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Alain Berset signs the new social security agreement with Minister of State Nigel Adams. It applies provisionally from 1 November 2021. The same day, […]
Before the Parliamentary Group on Work, Alain Berset speaks about reconciling family and work and about early childhood support. Starting point: “Die Corona-Krise ist – was die Arbeit betrifft – eine Krise der Frauen.” In Switzerland too, unemployment caused by the pandemic hit young women first, as they hold the jobs without working from home, […]
Solothurn celebrates its bimillennium. Alain Berset first plays with the local passion for the number eleven: his name, ALAIN BERSET, has eleven letters; the town clock shows only eleven hours. Then he speaks of the spirit of Wengi, of compromise and shared sovereignty, all the way to Europe: “Gute Kompromisse sind oft grösser als der […]
At the LAC cultural centre in Lugano, Alain Berset presents the Swiss Music Awards. The Grand Award goes to Stephan Eicher; fourteen other musicians are honoured. He addresses the “friends of roads and guitars” and proposes a journey from Engelberg to Carcassonne, a thousand kilometres for a thousand lives to honour, with a detour via […]
In Basel, presentation of the Swiss Design Awards and of the Swiss Grand Award for Design to the graphic designer Julia Born, the photographer and art director Peter Knapp and the researcher Sarah Owens. Alain Berset asks what the pandemic will make of society: more innovative or more conservative, open or tempted by a new […]
On 22 September, at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, the Federal Office of Culture and Europa Nostra organise a high-level debate on Baukultur, as part of the European Cultural Heritage Summit. Keynote by the architect David Chipperfield. Alain Berset debates with the German State Secretary Anne Katrin Bohle and Francisco de Paula Coelho, Dean of the […]
The Fribourg daily celebrates its 150th anniversary. Alain Berset addresses the “friends of editorials and columns” by way of a detour: another “Liberté”, French-speaking and Catholic, born in 1913 in Winnipeg, whose first issue proclaimed: “La Liberté n’est pas et ne sera jamais une feuille politique”. He speaks about the role of the regional press […]
Switzerland hosts the third UN World Data Forum, for the first time in hybrid format: 7,626 registered participants, 668 of them present in Berne. On 3 October, Alain Berset opens it as host; António Guterres and Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, speak by video. He starts from a quotation attributed to Churchill, about the statistics […]
In Geneva, Alain Berset opens the extraordinary session of the WMO Congress, alongside the President, Gerhard Adrian, the Secretary-General, Petteri Taalas, and Mami Mizutori, UN Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction. Beforehand, he visits the MeteoSwiss forecasting room. After the summer of floods, he stresses reducing the impact of natural disasters and climate change, and […]
At the University of Zurich, before the Schweizerisches Institut für Auslandforschung, Alain Berset starts from Gramsci: “Die alte Welt liegt im Sterben, die neue ist noch nicht geboren. Es ist die Zeit der Monster.” We are living, he says, through an interregnum: the liberal post-war order is crumbling, its promise of progress for each generation […]
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