By Thierry Dime
A “fixed price” that never existed except in the official narrative: that is what the Control Committee’s report reveals about the F-35s. It does not merely call a former Federal Councillor into question; it establishes that the Federal Council itself should never have believed in it, and that for months no one read the clause that would have changed everything. When a Federal Councillor’s word proves unfounded, it is not just a reputation that is shaken: the top floor of the edifice of trust loses its footing. The question is no longer who was wrong, but whether the Swiss public can still be content with the word of its Federal Councillors. What is at stake is the credit extended to a public promise: can it still be taken at face value without being checked?
Within Switzerland’s institutional landscape, the Federal Council occupies a singular position. Elected for four years, it cannot be brought down by Parliament, and its only lasting foundation is the credibility of its collective word. That credibility is high: according to the OECD, 62% of Swiss respondents in 2025 said they had high trust in their federal government, compared with an OECD average of 40%. That is precisely what makes the F-35 affair so delicate.
On 8 September, the National Council’s Control Committee concluded that no fixed price had been contractually agreed with the United States, and that the Defence Department and the Federal Council should never have proceeded on that assumption. The executive was therefore not a mere bystander to the error; it amplified it. The paradox of this affair deserves to be stated precisely: the committee found no evidence of intentional deception. The problem is more insidious. This was not a lie but a tolerated ambiguity, repeated at every level until it hardened into public certainty. On a contract worth more than CHF 6 billion, few of those involved had read the full text, no cross-checking mechanism was in place, and the doubts raised by the Swiss Federal Audit Office as early as 2022 did not change the narrative.
This nuance is crucial to understanding what is at stake. A lie can be sanctioned and a culprit identified. An unfounded certainty, repeated at every level, is harder to address: no one really lied, yet everyone now has reason to doubt. For citizens, the distinction quickly blurs. Whether they were misled or merely poorly informed, they are left with the fact that the promise was not worth what they were told. What erodes trust over time is not the mistake itself but the absence of any visible consequence, and here the accountability framework appears locked. Members of the Federal Council enjoy absolute immunity for statements made before Parliament, the former minister’s personal liability is considered unlikely, and the only remaining avenue is political: a parliamentary inquiry committee whose outcome remains uncertain.
It should also be noted that no parliamentary committee has ever been granted access to the contract despite repeated requests, the former minister having argued that such documents are never disclosed. From the citizen’s perspective, the sequence is simple: a broken promise, no vote, no sanction, but a bill to pay. Institutional trust is not restored by statements of intent. It rests on what the OECD calls reliability and integrity, two qualities demonstrated through visible procedures. The committee has in fact outlined some of them: a systematic role for the internal legal service rather than external lawyers, and a clear negotiating mandate. These measures are useful, but they will not suffice if they remain internal.
Trust is not inherited capital; it is rebuilt through repeated proof. That is true of companies, and truer still of a government whose only foundation is its word. No institution or leader can live indefinitely on credit accumulated by predecessors: that credit wears thin with every unverified promise. The Federal Council must respond to the committee by mid-December, and Defence Minister Martin Pfister has pledged to do so before the deadline.
For a government, however, the exercise is more demanding than for a company. A company can win back its customers’ trust with a discount, a warranty or a change of management. A government has no such levers, and its word will be tested again at the ballot box: in summer 2027, the Federal Council plans to put to a popular vote a temporary 0.8 percentage-point increase in VAT to finance an armaments fund. It will then ask citizens to trust its figures, nearly seven years after voters approved a CHF 6 billion ceiling by just 50.1%.
In a country that has built its reputation on the reliability of its word, trust will no longer be a starting point but an outcome, one the Federal Council will have to earn clause by clause.
Find all our Editorials
