Alain Berset opens the NIFFF. To get there, he says, took courage: the road passes through the Fribourg village of Misery, and through a place called “la Morte”. Stephen King would approve. The fantastic, he recalls, is one of the oldest genres in cinema: Méliès sends his heroes to the Moon in 1902, Ashley Miller […]
On the eve of 1 August, Alain Berset speaks in Lindau, in the canton of Zurich, in “Früh-Deutsch”, a nod to the debate on early language teaching. He tells the story of Julius Maggi, who at 23 takes over the family mill in Kemptthal and, rather than fight on prices, invents a new food. Switzerland, […]
On 1 August, Alain Berset is in Sierre, in the year of the 200th anniversary of Valais joining the Confederation. As “minister of meteorology”, he salutes the sun on the town’s coat of arms and the Plaine Morte radar. He takes up the same question as in Lindau: “How can we go on making competitiveness […]
At the Swiss Pavilion of Expo Milano, devoted to food, Alain Berset brings the food industry together for a round table on sugar reduction. The FDHA and ten companies (bio-familia, Bossy Céréales, Coop, Cremo, Emmi, Migros, Molkerei Lanz, Nestlé Suisse, Zwicky, Wander) sign a memorandum of understanding: they will review the recipes of their yoghurts […]
On 5 August, on the Piazza Grande, Alain Berset opens the festival: “In Switzerland, the leopard is a protected animal.” Care must be taken, he says, that this big cat does not feed on popcorn alone. On the 6th, at a press conference, he presents the new film funding regime for 2016–2020: the PICS programme, […]
Before Interpharma, the association of research-based pharmaceutical companies, Alain Berset recalls the industry’s first public appearance: a 25-metre tower at the 1939 Landi. On substance: “Gesundheitspolitik bedeutet also nicht einfach Kosten senken.” But costs will keep rising: according to the Federal Finance Administration, they will go from 11% of GDP today to almost 16% in […]
Alain Berset opens the Swiss Statistics Days with Churchill: a politician must be able to predict what will happen tomorrow, and then explain why it did not happen. For the minister of social affairs, health and culture, statistics are a compass: without demographic scenarios, no pension reform; without the FSO’s MARS project, no measures against […]
In Geneva, before the Swiss Union of Cities, Alain Berset introduces himself as a “Landei”: Belfaux, where he lives, has 2,992 inhabitants. He borrows the image of the architect Rem Koolhaas: the medieval city is a hard-boiled egg, the industrial city a fried egg, the modern city scrambled eggs. More than half of humanity lives […]
Before the Federation of Swiss Food Industries, Alain Berset talks salt and sugar. The Swiss consume on average nine grams of salt a day; the WHO recommends five. Working with the industry, the salt content of bread has been brought below 1.5 grams per 100 grams, “ohne dass es jemand gemerkt hat”. He recalls the […]
Alain Berset opens the 13th edition of Fantoche, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. One of the festival’s themes is entitled “Family – sweet and sour”: invited as minister of culture or as a member of the Federal Council family, he leans towards the second hypothesis, in the middle of an election year. He salutes […]
Third meeting of the “health quintet”, after Münster in 2013 and the Kleine Scheidegg in 2014: Sabine Oberhauser (Austria, host), Hermann Gröhe (Germany), Lydia Mutsch (Luxembourg), Mauro Pedrazzini (Liechtenstein) and Alain Berset. The ministers discuss the availability of medicines and the long-term financing of health systems; their final declaration calls for new approaches to setting […]
Back from Vienna, Alain Berset inaugurates the sixth edition of Le Livre sur les quais: 160,000 visitors in five years. He covered his office with photos of the lake in order to write, he says, and ended up “fishing out a metaphor”. The landscape seen from the Morges landing stage is that of Swiss literature: […]
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