Wine Brouhaha Typifies Swiss ‘Civil War’

A Cabinet minister’s love of wine and food has become the latest symbol of a cultural divide between the German-speaking majority and the more easygoing Swiss French.

Economics Minister Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, known for working long hours, does not deny a taste for the fruity white wine of his native western Switzerland.

In January, the German-language tabloid Sonntagsblick stirred a hornet’s nest by urging the 55-year-old minister to resign after doctors found an irregular heartbeat during a routine checkup.

A slanging match that followed, while conducted mainly in the media, highlighted what many fear is a growing estrangement between the country’s two main language groups.

Delamuraz and Foreign Minister Rene Felber, the two French-area ministers in the seven-member Cabinet, are leaders of an effort to move Switzerland from fence-sitting on international affairs into the European Community.

Polls indicate German-speaking eastern Switzerland is less enthusiastic about the idea than the French region.

The jovial economics minister is a symbol of the minority Swiss French, who most of the German-speaking majority acknowledge are more relaxed, more “Mediterranean.”

Two-thirds of Switzerland’s 6.7-million people speak German. They provide the image of the reserved, orderly, inward-looking Swiss.

French speakers, 18% of the population, drive faster and worry less about the environment. They have more in common with Swiss Italians, who make up 12%.

Sonntagsblick said editorially that, given the workload Delamuraz was carrying, “lust for life is incompatible with the burdens of office.”

Le Matin, a mass-circulation paper in French, declared such a notion “disgusting” and exhorted its readers to support “their” minister.

Felber, the foreign minister, got this advice from a German-language commentator: Smoking is even more dangerous than alcohol.

Two months earlier, a German-area lawmaker raised hackles by suggesting some Cabinet members--obviously the two Swiss French ministers--drank too much.

All this exposed the “Roesti Gap,” a cultural divide named for a typically Swiss German dish akin to hash-brown potatoes.

In a survey swiftly commissioned by a serious weekly, 60% of those polled in the French area said “different mentalities,” not language, account for the gap. Even more, 70%, felt they were being culturally and politically dominated by the Swiss Germans.

Max Mabillard, editor of a French-language business magazine, decried the “old, stupid image of the boozing western Swiss who can’t be trusted with anything serious.”

Jacques Pilet, a prominent journalist in western Switzerland who favors membership in the European Community, said Swiss German “condescension . . . is becoming increasingly unabashed and arrogant.”

Even a Swiss German columnist warned against “majority arrogance” toward French and Italian areas, which joined the 700-year-old confederation only at the beginning of the 19th Century.

Drinking habits illustrate the cultural divide.

French and Italian speakers are estimated to consume about twice as much wine as Swiss Germans, whose preference for beer makes it the most popular alcoholic drink.

A French Swiss is twice as likely to drink wine daily than a German Swiss, a survey indicated.

After 10 days of hospital treatment, Delamuraz said: “My health is restored. I feel good.”

He resumed his duties two days later, but acknowledged: “There are pleasures of the palate I will have to forgo.”