Asked what sort of country they would like to live in, the Swiss favour nature, local production and personal freedom—and are distinctly cool on a future run by artificial intelligence.
Futurologists tend to be more interested in what is new than in what works. The Swiss, it seems, are less drawn to novelty. A new survey by Monda Futura, a Swiss non-profit group, asked people not what they feared about the future but what sort of future they could live with. Its Schweizer Zukunftskompass 2026 combines ideas gathered from more than 1,300 participants with a representative survey of 2,203 people conducted with gfs.bern. Respondents assessed 40 possible futures covering subjects including health, farming, technology, work, education and democracy.
The result is not a manifesto for flying cars. It is closer to an argument for a cleaner, slower and more local version of Switzerland.
The most popular scenario envisages flourishing nature supported by more conscious consumption. On a scale running from -2, strong rejection, to +2, strong support, it scores 1.60. Seasonal and regional food production comes second, on 1.58, followed by food embedded in local cycles, greener environments designed around short journeys and a revival of high-quality local craftsmanship.
The rest of the top ten follows much the same pattern. The Swiss like a well-staffed publicly financed health system, a more circular economy and a conception of health that includes mind, body and surroundings. They also favour withdrawing, at least somewhat, from permanent digital presence and artificial intelligence. That last proposition scores 1.21.
At the bottom are rather different ideas. New forms of communal living score -0.18. A world in which humans decide and artificial intelligence carries out their instructions scores -0.21. Continuous data-driven health monitoring does worst of all, at -0.24. This produces what the report calls a “technology paradox”. The authors cite research suggesting that three-quarters of Swiss adults already use AI chatbots, yet respondents dislike visions in which such technology becomes pervasive in daily life. They are much happier with technology as a tool than as an organising principle.
That distinction matters. The survey does not show that Switzerland is anti-technology. Nor does it reveal a population longing to recreate the 1950s. Monda Futura finds that scenarios based on familiar institutions, regionalism and slower living score an average of 1.09, compared with 0.71 for more radically progressive and technological ones. But the favoured “retro” qualities are things such as craftsmanship, nature, local ties and face-to-face contact, rather than hierarchy or social conservatism. More interesting is the mixture of values underneath these preferences. The authors divide the scenarios into broad families. Ecological and social futures score highest, at 1.17. Liberal-bourgeois ones come next, at 0.90. High tech futures trail badly, at 0.32.
Yet this is not straightforwardly a victory for the political left. Respondents simultaneously support regional food systems and environmental protection, personal responsibility and civil society, direct democracy and a relatively small state. The report calls this the “silent middle”: a combination of ecological concern and social stability with markets, individual responsibility and limited government.
That combination feels recognisably Swiss. Political arguments may divide along the left-right axis—the survey finds political self-identification to be the main dividing line in 29 of the 40 scenarios—but many concrete preferences cut across it. People may disagree over political ideology while agreeing that their neighbourhood should be pleasant, their food trustworthy, their government competent and technology kept in its place.
Nor does the research find much evidence of the great generational struggle often assumed to accompany climate change and digitisation. Age is the main dividing factor in only four of the 40 scenarios. Young and old broadly share preferences for regionalism, environmental protection, social security and personal freedom. One exception concerns education: people aged 15-29 are markedly keener than the over-75s on clearly structured institutions that nevertheless allow individual paths.
There are reasons not to treat these numbers as entirely objective. The raw sample leaned somewhat to the political left. The researchers therefore weighted it by language, sex, age, education, urbanisation and political self-identification. The resulting weighting reduced the survey’s effective sample size to 697, despite more than 2,000 respondents. That does not make the findings worthless, but it counsels against taking them too seriously.
The wording matters, too. Respondents were not asked whether particular policies should be enacted, financed or imposed. They were asked, in effect: how well could you live with this future? A pleasant vision of thriving nature and regional food is easier to endorse than the taxes, regulations and trade-offs that might be required to produce it.
Even so, the broad pattern is striking. Switzerland’s preferred future is neither a technological utopia nor a revolutionary social experiment. It is greener but not radically collectivist; more local but not isolationist; socially secure but wary of an overbearing state; technologically capable but suspicious of technological overreach.
For an exercise devoted to imagining the future, its most interesting conclusion may therefore be how little the Swiss want to abandon the fundamentals of the present. Their ideal tomorrow looks less like a new world than a better-kept version of the current one.
More on this:
Swiss Future Compass 2026 (in German)
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