BERN. The Swiss National Bank does not choose its own chairman, and nothing in the National Bank Act mentions party balance or cantonal origin. Yet as the succession to the departing chairman enters its decisive phase, the conversations that matter are taking place not in the bank's sober headquarters on Börsenstrasse but in the restaurants around the Bundesplatz. The most consequential hiring decision in Swiss public life is, once again, being made entirely out of public view.
The formal choreography is straightforward. The 11-member Bank Council, the institution's supervisory body, agrees a proposal and forwards it to the Federal Council, which appoints the three members of the Governing Board. Six of the Bank Council's members are themselves chosen by the government, a fact that gives Bern leverage it politely pretends not to hold.
The current chairman leaves in the spring, and three names circulate with varying degrees of discretion: the sitting vice chairman, a divisional head respected in markets, and an external candidate with academic credentials and international experience. None has declared anything publicly. In the Swiss manner, ambition is expressed through silence and the placement of supportive commentary in the financial press.
The stakes are larger than the personnel. The SNB's balance sheet, swollen by a decade of currency interventions, stands near CHF 900 billion, and its profit distribution agreement sends up to CHF 6 billion a year to the Confederation and the cantons. With the franc persistently strong, exporters in machine tools, precision instruments and watchmaking watch every signal from Zurich for hints of tolerance or intervention.
Inside the political class, the quiet struggle is not about monetary doctrine, on which all candidates broadly agree, but about temperament and allegiance. The price stability mandate of zero to 2 per cent inflation is uncontested. What divides the interested parties is how forcefully the bank should resist franc appreciation, and how candidly it should explain itself to a parliament that grumbles each time the balance sheet grows.
The parties have staked positions with unusual reticence. The right wants a chairman who will defend independence against any greening of the mandate; the left would like the bank to weigh climate risk and social consequences more openly; the centre and the liberals, who dominate the relevant committees, prefer continuity in a technocratic key. Each camp denies lobbying, and each is lobbying.
The numbers under discussion are unforgiving. The policy rate stands at 0.25 per cent, inflation at 0.6 per cent, and the franc near levels that squeeze margins in the Jura and the Midlands. A misjudged appointment, bankers warn, would be priced by markets within hours; a politicised one would be priced for years.
Participants insist the process remains dignified, at least by the standards of neighbouring central banks. “The bank guards its independence most fiercely when politicians pretend not to want it,” a member of the Bank Council said.
Critics counter that the real risk is not politicisation but opacity. The Governing Board wields extraordinary power over the currency, the banking system and, through its distribution agreement, the budgets of 26 cantons, yet its selection proceeds with less public scrutiny than a municipal planning decision. Calls for parliamentary hearings, voiced after the Credit Suisse rescue, have so far gone nowhere.
The Bank Council is expected to settle its proposal in early November. The Federal Council would then decide before Christmas, allowing a handover in the spring and a full monetary policy assessment under new leadership by June. Officials privately say the timetable is firm, because a contested drift into an election year is the one outcome everyone genuinely fears.
The appointment also matters beyond Switzerland. The SNB sits at the conservative end of the central banking spectrum, and its choices on the franc ripple through euro area inflation and the calculations of the European Central Bank. Whoever takes the chair inherits not just an institution but a position in the small club of central bankers whose decisions move markets.
For now the choreography holds: no declarations, no public shortlists, no visible fingerprints. The quiet struggle will end with a single agenda item at a Federal Council meeting, decided in minutes after months of manoeuvre. The arguments conducted in silence will shape Swiss monetary policy for a decade.