Is this woman the face of the new Switzerland? A Switzerland that no longer wants to be a tax haven at any price? Jacqueline Badran would certainly smack you in the face with that question. The 60-year-old Swiss social democrat maintains a rough tone, and not only with journalists. She even puts down members of the government from time to time when her political mission requires it. Ueli Maurer, finance minister since 2016 and politician of the right-wing conservative SVP, is something like her favorite enemy, because Jacqueline Badran’s specialty is financial and tax policy. An exchange of blows between the two in the “Arena” of Swiss television a few weeks ago went viral.
She causes a stir, this argumentative woman from Zurich with her voice dark from smoking. “Jacqueline Badran, who sleeps three hours a day, four at most, takes five seconds at most to get to one hundred,” wrote the magazine des Tages-Anzeiger about you. At that time, after many years in the Zurich city parliament, she was still relatively fresh in the Bundeshaus in Bern. She is now one of the most experienced and distinguished members of parliament in Switzerland, and she has also been vice-president of her party since 2020.
But now Badran’s level of awareness and popularity have reached a new high: it was she who fought in the past few weeks against new tax breaks for Swiss companies – and won. On Sunday, Swiss voters rejected a reform of the federal law on stamp duties. With the change in the law, finance minister Maurer and the majority of parliament wanted to abolish the issue tax, a special tax that is always incurred when a company is founded or its equity increased.
“Damaging for Switzerland as a business location”, “dampening innovation”, “danger of emigration”: This is how the proponents of the reform advertised, and such arguments usually work well in Switzerland. As is well known, it is not only due to the many highly trained specialists and the high quality of life that so many large corporations have settled in the small country, but also to the low taxes. To ensure that this advantage is preserved, even if the global minimum tax of 15 percent is coming soon, the finance minister wants to relieve companies elsewhere.
“Like an Old Married Couple”
But although Maurer and Badran have known each other for a long time and like each other (they sometimes functioned “like an old married couple,” Maurer once said in front of the National Council), the finance minister apparently did not reckon with the SP politician’s power. The studied economist, who heads an IT company, became the face of the campaign against the “stamp tax bug”, threw figures around on talk shows, lectured loudly about Switzerland’s unfair tax policy, which only taxes wages, pensions and consumption and relieve “capital” bit by bit, and cut for a campaign video even slice after slice of salami so that everyone really gets it. Badran’s method worked: Switzerland rejected the finance minister’s plan on Sunday with a surprisingly clear 62 percent of the votes against. Even this hardened politician cried for a moment.
Badran herself asserts at every opportunity that she abhors quarrels and discord and is actually constantly on the lookout for compromises and understanding. “The best thing is consensus solutions!” She said, very Swiss, in a television portrait a few months ago. The fact that she still does not avoid the political melee earns her respect across the political camps – but apparently also leaves a mark on someone like her. Badran surprisingly announced on Facebook on Monday evening that she would be taking a break from politics on medical advice, at least until the summer. The “many defensive battles” would have affected her physically and mentally.