The Swiss stock market has plunged, the cabinet has held crisis talks and the country’s president, Karin Keller-Sutter, has been accused of mishandling a vital phone call with the White House after Donald Trump hit the country with a shock 39% export tariff.
Switzerland, home to some of the world’s best-known luxury brands, was left stunned after the US president on Friday imposed one of the highest tariff rates in his global trade reset. Industry associations said tens of thousands of jobs were at risk.
Local media had reported that after three months of talks, negotiators believed they had secured a 10% tariff on exports to the US, a key market for Swiss products such as luxury watches, jewellery and chocolate but also machinery and pharmaceuticals.
But after a 30-minute call with Keller-Sutter on Thursday evening variously described as “bad-tempered”, “disastrous” and “badly misjudged”, Trump imposed a levy even higher than the 31% he had announced on his so-called “liberation day” in April.
Switzerland’s blue-chip stock market index opened 1.8% lower on Monday, the first day of trading since the tariff announcement on Swiss National Day, a public holiday. The cabinet said after an emergency meeting it would improve its offer to Trump.
“Switzerland enters this new phase ready to present a more attractive offer, taking US concerns into account and seeking to ease the current tariff situation,” it said in a statement, without detailing what concrete proposals it might make.
Swiss officials rejected reports that the 39% rate was imposed because of the call between Trump and Keller-Sutter, the finance minister and current president under the country’s rotating system. “The call was not a success,” a government source said.
“There was not a good outcome for Switzerland. But there was not a quarrel. Trump made it clear from the very beginning that he had a completely different point of view, that 10% tariffs were not enough,” the source told Reuters.The rate would have a huge impact on Switzerland’s export-oriented economy and could spark a recession, said Hans Gersbach, an economist at ETH Zürich university, especially if pharmaceuticals, which are not covered, were included.
Swiss companies, whose exports to the US account for about one-sixth of their total foreign sales, face one of the steepest US duties – only Laos, Myanmar and Syria had higher figures, at 40-41%. The EU and the UK negotiated 15% and 10% respectively.
Swiss media were less forgiving. “Faced with Trump, Keller-Sutter was surely too naive,” was the headline in the tabloid Blick, while 24 Heures said what should have been her “masterpiece” ended up as “the heaviest defeat of her political career”.
