Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference Thursday focussed on key themes of Trump’s election campaign and was seen as a combative broadside against Europe and Germany in particular, accusing them of limiting free speech and excluding parties that voice strong concerns over immigration.
While the speech elicited strong rebukes from German and other leaders, Karin Keller-Sutter, Switzerland’s finance minister who currently holds the country’s one-year rotating presidency, urged calm and praised the “very liberal principle” expressed in the speech.
In an interview with the Le Temps daily published Saturday, she said that “in a certain sense, (the speech) was very Swiss in its call to listen to the population.”
Keller-Sutter, who attended the conference but had not met with members of the new US administration, highlighted that Vance had spoken about the need to “defend values that we share, like freedom and the possibility for the population to express itself”.
“It was a plea for direct democracy. One could read it that way,” said the president of Switzerland, a country renowned for its frequent recourse to referendums.
Vance told the Munich conference that “democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters”.
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“There’s no room for firewalls,” he added, using the common term for the German political taboo against working with the far right.
Vance slammed EU “commissars” for stifling free expression and charged that “across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat”.
Asked if she agreed with Vance’s accusation of EU censorship, Keller-Sutter said: “That is his opinion”.
But, she stressed, “he also affirmed a very liberal principle that I share: you must not simply share the opinions of others. You must also fight for them to be able to express them”.
