Business leaders are used to pulling everything together and making major decisions for their companies. However, nobody is exempt from political decisions and amendments to the law and such processes often result in significant, permanent changes for companies. Using a few useful websites and tools, business leaders can gain a good overview of all of these processes in Switzerland, enabling them to assess risks more effectively and to take preventative steps.
Whether it’s corporate tax reform, the Sovereign Money Initiative or the 1:12 initiative: politics and legislation constantly cause upheaval for Swiss businesses and busy business leaders can run the risk of being taken by surprise by such developments.
The following websites and tools can help businesspeople to keep tabs on developments in Swiss politics and the issues relevant to them.
The Federal Chancellery is the Federal Council’s staff organization and, amongst other things, is responsible for ensuring political rights are exercised and implemented correctly in Switzerland. Visitors to the website will find a detailed overview of every popular initiative and every referendum as well as information on the current status of the respective proposal. This may sound rather dry and unappealing, but the Federal Chancellery’s well-structured lists provide a reliable and complete overview of all past, current and future proposals.
Vimentis is an association founded by students in 2003 which writes neutral articles on votes and other key political issues and carries out the largest neutral political online survey nationwide each year. This survey is conducted under the patronage of the presidents of the Greens, GLP, SP, CVP, FDP, BDP and SVP political parties and it is this broad support that makes the Vimentis survey such a useful barometer of public opinion for business.
SThe link will open in a new window martvote and Parteienkompass are two useful online voting aids from the politically neutral association Politools. Using a questionnaire, visitors can compare their political positions with those of other parties and candidates and obtain an electronic recommendation on how to vote. Smartvote also provides a good overview of all forthcoming elections at the three levels of government. This allows businesses to find out which politicians best represent their interests and when and where they are standing for election.
A fully automated monitoring solution is an option for anyone who is too busy but has finances available. Using individual search requests, proposals, bills and political matters relevant to the company at all three levels of government can be filtered and automatically assigned to pre-defined issues. A clearly presented dashboard also makes issue management much easier. A wide range of options is available on the market today to professionalize issue monitoring in this way.
In Switzerland, we are fortunate enough to have a solid constitutional state and transparent political processes. With a basic understanding and interest in these processes and well-structured monitoring, extremely busy businesspeople can ensure effective protection from unpleasant surprises.
