New Swiss finance minister sees difficult decisions ahead

By John Revill

ZURICH (Reuters) -Switzerland’s new finance minister said on Thursday that difficult decisions lie ahead for the wealthy country as it wrestles with a widening gap in its public finances.

Karin Keller-Sutter, from the centre-right Liberals, will replace Ueli Maurer at the start of next year in a reshuffle of the seven-member cabinet sparked by the resignations of two members.

Maurer, a fiscal hawk from the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), had announced in September he would retire.

Keller-Sutter’s priorities will be to keep spending under control after an expected 2022 deficit of 4.1 billion Swiss francs ($4.38 billion) caused by extraordinary expenditure to tackle the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Extra spending, mainly for a financial safety net it has set for the power generation sector, brings the financing deficit to around 4.8 billion francs next year.

“It’s clear that decisions need to be made relatively quickly here,” Keller-Sutter told a news conference in Bern. “Those decisions are not going to be painless, they are going to be painful.”

She said decisions would require give and take from all ministries and nothing could be solved with a “crowbar”.

The reshuffle was also triggered after Energy Minister Simonetta Sommaruga, a Social Democrat, announced last month she would resign at the end of the year to help care for her husband, who is recovering from a stroke.

Albert Roesti, a newcomer to the cabinet from the SVP, will take charge of the environment and energy ministry.

Under the Swiss model of consensus government, the cabinet roles are distributed to the different parties according to their representation in parliament.

President Ignazio Cassis, who kept his job as foreign minister, said Roesti’s past as a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry would not be a difficulty.

“Of course, we also talked about past tasks and competencies of the new members,” Cassis said. “But no Federal Councillor decides for himself alone; it is always a collegial decision.”

($1 = 0.9355 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by John Revill; editing by Michael Shields and Richard Chang)