Federal government remains mum on tariff negotiations in the USA
Keystone-SDA
For tactical reasons, the government has refrained to comment on how its tariff negotiating team in Washington is proceeding.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
On Friday, it was still unclear with whom in the US administration the Swiss delegation, which had travelled to Washington specifically to discuss tariffs, was in contact.
The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (Seco) and the Swiss economics ministry also remained tight-lipped when asked by the Keystone-SDA news agency about the members of the delegation, further planned meetings, and the negotiation timeline.
More
More
How Trump is manoeuvring Switzerland closer to the EU
It was also unclear what possible offer was on the table to abolish the 39% tariffs on imports to the US which came into force on August 7. According to Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter, who spoke to media on Thursday, Switzerland’s beefed-up offer is within the framework of the negotiating mandate approved by the foreign policy committees in parliament. She did not provide any further details, saying the offer couldn’t be discussed publicly.
However, Keller-Sutter did admit that the delegation had pointed out the fact that Switzerland is committed to buying F-35 aircrafts and a Patriot surface-to-air missile system from the US.
Free trade discussions
In an interview in February, Seco’s Helene Budliger Artieda raised the prospect of negotiations for a free trade agreement with the US. Whether such a deal is an option remained open on Friday.
“Switzerland is continuing to work on identifying and removing trade barriers and is always interested in examining further options to further strengthen trade relations with the US,” Seco told Keystone-SDA. It added that it is seeking dialogue with the US administration to find ways to strengthen the trade relationship.
Switzerland and the US have twice held exploratory talks on a possible bilateral free trade agreement – once some 20 years ago and most recently under the first Trump administration.
Talks were not continued under the Biden administration, for whom negotiating free trade deals was not a foreign policy goal.
More
Translated from German by DeepL/dos
We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.
Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.
If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at english@swissinfo.ch.
