International cooperation: the National Assembly accepts 11 billion euros
Keystone-SDA
Switzerland’s international cooperation strategy 2025-2028 has been recommended a budget of almost CHF11 billion after weeks of political wrangling.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
On Thursday, the Swiss parliament agreed to lift the spending brake on development cooperation to the tune of CHF9.31 billion.
However, this is less than the CHF9.66 billion requested by the Federal Council and twice accepted by the Senate. The latter will have to vote again.
On Monday, the deputies had refused to lift the spending brake, as the qualified majority of 101 votes had not been reached. On Thursday, they gave the go-ahead by 129 votes to 66. Only the Swiss People’s Party was against.
Previously, this party, supported some centrists, had managed to reduce the budget by CHF351 million. Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis warned in vain that the cuts would primarily affect Ukraine.
Translated from German by DeepL/mga
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
