As the campaign for the October 22 federal election gets underway in Switzerland, Thomas Matter embodies the vindictive energy driving the Swiss People's Party (SVP, populist right). A member of the Swiss parliament in Bern from Zurich, the 57-year-old banker amassed a 150 million Swiss francs fortune by 2017, with no indicator of it having diminished since. Neue Helvetische Bank, the financial institution he founded in 2011, is doing wonderfully, much like the Swiss economy itself. Having come out of the pandemic unscathed, every financial indicator is looking positive: Inflation remains contained (2.4%), and unemployment is at an all-time low (1.9%).
And yet, Matter is an angry man eager to battle it out in the ballot boxes, where polls have the SVP, already the country's leading party since 2003, further extending its lead near the 30% mark. Its main rival, the Swiss Socialist Party, is plateauing at 16%.
The Zurich lawmaker's latest fit of anger stems from the weather forecasts on the public television network SRF. According to him and other members of his party, they are being deliberately manipulated to further the agenda of climate-conscious political groups. The SVP has many climate skeptics in its ranks and refuses to accept any constraining measures to mitigate global warming's impact. "SRF Meteo is being used to spread climate panic during an election year," said Matter. For example, recent temperatures in Athens "only" reached 42 degrees Celsius instead of the 50 degrees Celsius the network predicted, supposedly proving the duplicity of the forecasters – whose data for Switzerland were incidentally on the mark.
Like all controversies initiated by the populist party's bigwigs, the "weather forecast affair" has been in the Swiss media's headlines for the last few days, even forcing SRF's chief meteorologist to explain himself. "We don't influence our forecasts," said Thomas Bucheli. "The algorithm overestimated the temperature forecasts for abroad during the summer heat wave, for which we are extremely sorry." In any case, Matter has a hard time putting up with public service broadcasting services, calling it a "den of leftists." To bring it to heel, he and his party recently collected over 100,000 signatures, enough to call a vote within 18 months that could force a massive reduction in TV license fees.
After a slight setback in the previous elections in 2019, which were marked by the Greens' surge in the polls, the SVP is staging a comeback under the banner of revenge and cultural warfare. Against "climate ideology," "woke excesses," and the weakening of the country's neutrality, criticized by all sides abroad since the onset of the war in Ukraine. But most of all, against "uncontrolled immigration and the failure of the asylum system. The whole of Europe has the same problem: The Schengen-Dublin system no longer works," condemned Marco Chiesa, president of the SVP from Ticino. "Switzerland is not immune to the growing and intolerable pressure of illegal immigrants at its borders, and it's not because neighboring countries don't know how to manage the situation that we have to suffer the consequences."
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