The upcoming votes will be of great importance for the future of Switzerland.image: Imago / Keystone, montage watson
Rösti Bridge
In Switzerland, the distrust of Donald Trump is a paradox: on the one hand, we preach tolerance, but on the other hand, the thought of Trump makes us collectively nervous. And then the question arises: What are our democratic values really like when it comes to Trumpism and its political aftermath?
June 1, 2026, 2:44 p.mJune 1, 2026, 2:44 p.m
Samuel Bendahan
The polling institute Gallup has published its End-of-Year Survey 2025 – and there is a real gem in it: a global comparison of how people around the world rate certain leaders, from the Pope to Putin to Donald Trump. Spoiler: hardly surprising – but still pretty awesome. Because according to this survey, there is exactly one country on this planet where Trump is even more unpopular than here in Switzerland: Iran.
In fact, Switzerland, along with Sweden and Norway, is one of the countries that really can’t stand Donald Trump: 87 percent have a negative image of him, only 9 percent are on his side. For a country otherwise known for compromise and moderation, this comes as a bit of a surprise. But why actually?
Rösti Bridge
Every Sunday watson invites personalities from French-speaking Switzerlandto comment on current events or to shed light on a topic that otherwise receives too little attention.
Also present: Nicolas Feuz (writer), Anne Challandes (Swiss Farmers’ Association), Roger Nordmann (advisor, former SP National Councilor), Damien Cottier (FDP), Céline Weber (GLP), Karin Perraudin (Groupe Mutuel, former CVP), Samuel Bendahan (SP), Ivan Slatkine (publisher) and the QoQa-Otte.
translation
This text was written by our colleagues from French-speaking Switzerland and we translated it for you.
An opinion that leaves no room for doubt
To put it carefully, the basic tenor towards Donald Trump is currently rather critical in many places. Here too, several surveys paint this picture quite clearly. According to GFS.bern, 80 percent of Swiss people are concerned about the world under Trump – and about a policy in which, in the end, what counts is strength. Tamedia adds: 81 percent think that he is a bad politician, 87 percent reject his tariff policy, and 84 percent say that their image of the USA has become significantly worse since he returned to the presidency.
In these surveys, Trump is perceived by the Swiss population as unpredictable, self-centered, hypocritical and anti-democratic. Switzerland is known to stand for compromise and consensus and therefore embodies the complete opposite.
The paradox of tolerance
There is a well-known paradox formulated by the philosopher Karl Popper in his book “The Open Society and Its Enemies” (1945). His idea: A completely tolerant society carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction if it tolerates its intolerant enemies without limits. They in turn take advantage of the freedom offered – and in the end tolerance itself is gone.
Karl Popper draws a conclusion that seems counterintuitive at first glance, but makes perfect sense: In order to maintain a tolerant society, you don’t have to tolerate intolerance. Not out of narrow-mindedness, but out of the healthy instinct of democratic self-preservation.
Tolerance is therefore not an absolute principle or moral pacifism, but a mutual contract: one grants others the right to be, think and believe differently as long as they grant the same right to others. Anyone who breaks this contract – by spreading inhumane content, attacking democratic institutions or preaching a “law of the stronger” logic – automatically places themselves outside the circle of tolerance.
Let’s now apply the paradox to Switzerland in 2026: A tolerant, open, humanitarian and democratic population does not mean folding your arms and watching in good humor as Trumpism tramples on these very values. The opposite is probably true. Likewise, it is not tolerant to uncritically accept initiatives that hide behind terms such as “sustainability” or common sense, but in reality could make a logic of exclusion a constitutional norm.
According to Karl Popper, simply tolerating both the internal and external Trump would mean nothing other than sawing off the democratic branch on which Switzerland has sat since 1848.
SVP against the DNA of Switzerland
So what values define us and therefore create the foundations of our country? There are many, and freedom is of course one of them: everyone should have the freedom to live according to their own values, as long as this freedom does not restrict the freedom of others.
One thing is clear: the values we share here in Switzerland are the exact opposite of Trump. Differences abound. A systematic analysis presented in the table below. It was created using artificial intelligence. She compares Trumpian values with those of Switzerland on various levels.
How did this table come about?
The table was created by a language model (AI) – from a simple request to contrast the values of Trumpism with Swiss political culture, without any specification or direction. Such models are trained on a huge corpus of human writing and learn which concepts are strongly connected to each other – and in which words. For each axis, the model then reflects the most common and typical associations from this pool.
The table therefore reflects how these two “worlds” are described en masse in written language, rather than a direct measurement of reality. Each factual statement was checked and sourced (see footnote). The illustrative sources show that the characterizations are based on numerous, consistent references.
All of these axes show how much our traditions are threatened today by the SVP’s attempt to bring a bit of Trump to us:
- Fortunately, the No Billag initiative was rejected by the population – otherwise it wanted to lead us into a media landscape controlled by a handful of oligarchs.
- On June 14, we will vote on an initiative that seeks to isolate us economically, stigmatize foreigners, limit access to basic services like health care, and reserve freedoms only for the rich.
- In September we will vote on a pro-Putin initiative that aims to reform neutrality in favor of dictatorships. (A little note: According to the Gallup poll, Switzerland is also one of the countries that like Vladimir Putin – and also Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – the least.)
- And finally: The SVP wants to sabotage our negotiations with the EU – even though it accounts for over 50 percent of our exports – just to hand us over to the USA and other authoritarian regimes.
If there are traditions that should be preserved, they are those that make us proud to live here: our democracy, our humanism and all the progress that we have been able to achieve thanks to our open, cooperative and benevolent nature.
If we support the dangerous SVP initiative “No 10 Million Switzerland” on June 14th, we would be moving away from these fundamental values and moving towards a logic such as that found with Trump or the SVP. The price for this would be high. Because, as is so often the case, in crises it is the middle and households with lower incomes that are hit first – even if we consciously trigger these crises ourselves.
Samuel Bendahan is…
… Doctor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and teaches there and at EPFL. The Vaudois is also an SP National Councilor, co-president of the Social Democratic group in Bern and a member of the Parliament’s Commission for Economic Affairs and Taxes. He works as a consultant in the areas of strategy, governance, leadership and finance for numerous companies. He also chairs the Swiss umbrella association Reading and Writing (DVLS), the umbrella association SAH Switzerland and the Lausanne housing cooperative SCCH Le Bled.
Image: keystone
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