Every day, the correspondents’ club describes how the same current event is illustrated in two countries.
Just over a year after the start of the war in Ukraine, Rheinmetall, Germany’s leading arms producer, floated on the Frankfurt stock exchange. The company’s stock market value has more than doubled in one year. Switzerland is reluctant to supply arms to Ukraine, neutrality obliges, the country of the Red Cross is far from being disarmed, and sells weapons of war, in Europe and as far as Qatar.
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Switzerland does not want to sell arms to a country at war
Despite its neutrality, Switzerland sells arms, but the sector employs 14,000 people, barely more than one percent of Swiss industry, with almost 1 billion euros last year, a record. These are not finished products, but rather components, software that will then equip defense systems, such as armored vehicles. Switzerland exports about two-thirds of its weapons to Europe, but also to the United States, and increasingly to Gulf countries such as Qatar. Switzerland refuses to allow its weapons to be sold or resold to a country at war. But the government had tried to authorize them in countries at war, in 2018. Faced with the outcry in the country of the Red Cross, the opposite happened: the law was toughened. With Ukraine, the Swiss Parliament is torn on what to do: authorize the delivery or re-export of arms to countries that share the same values as Switzerland? With the green light from the UN? Some elected officials explain that if you move the cursor, neutrality explodes. While waiting for Switzerland to make a decision, the rest of Europe is losing patience. Especially Germany, which could not recover Swiss ammunition for the Ukraine, decided to manufacture them itself.
In Germany, a fifth of arms exports go to kyiv
Germany is one of the main countries in the arms sector behind the United States, Russia, France and China. But this industry has a bad reputation in Germany. If Ukraine has demanded Leopard tanks in recent months, German arms manufacturers are a bit of the bad apple that we avoid highlighting. Berlin boasts of having stricter rules for these exports, especially when they concern countries that do not belong to the European Union, NATO or other allies. Arms deliveries have regularly sparked controversy. AT last fall, the delivery of equipment to Saudi Arabia, a country criticized for its human rights abuses, created a controversy. The new coalition in power since autumn 2021, starting with the Greens, wants to toughen these criteria and in particular to fight against arms exports to countries that do not respect human rights. But a new law is long overdue. With the war in Ukraine, Germany threw a principle overboard, namely no arms deliveries to countries at war. In 2022, a fifth of German exports were destined for Kyiv.