ZURICH. Democrats won control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in Tuesday’s United States midterm elections, the Associated Press and NBC News projected overnight. The result is a rebuke of President Donald Trump two years before he leaves office. On the Swiss exchange it landed as a political fact, not a new price for risk. By mid-morning the Swiss Market Index was almost where it had closed on Tuesday.
NBC’s decision desk estimated that Democrats would finish with at least 258 House seats, against about 177 for the Republicans. Control needs 218. Races already called had Democrats on 231 seats, a net gain of 29. In the Senate the party flipped at least seven seats, including Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina, and held Georgia and Michigan. Governorships flipped in Texas, Georgia, Ohio and Iowa. An NBC exit poll put disapproval of Trump at 62 per cent. Nearly half of voters said they had used the ballot to rebuke him.
What Zurich did with the result
The SMI opened a tenth of a per cent higher, cash reported just after the bell. At 09:10 it was up 0.02 per cent at 14,746.80, Agefi said, after a Tuesday close that was already 0.40 per cent lower. Fifteen minutes later the Keystone reading had it down 0.07 per cent at 14,732.87. The mid-cap SMIM was weaker, off 0.55 per cent at 3,206.60, and the broader SPI was down 0.12 per cent at 20,772.51. The gap between those prints is noise. The index did not reprice the election.
The split inside the index was more useful than the headline. At the open, Amrize, Swiss Re and Givaudan were among the weakest large names, down about 1.0, 1.0 and 0.8 per cent. Banks went the other way: Julius Baer rose about 2.0 per cent and UBS about 1.6 per cent, with Holcim up about 1.3 per cent. Barry Callebaut fell about 1.6 per cent after saying sales volumes had recovered late in the year to the end of August, but not enough to finish the year higher. Swiss Re reports nine-month figures on Thursday. Analysts expect a slight dip, not a shock.
A veto, not a new economic regime
Oddo BHF’s note, quoted across the Swiss wires, is the sentence the session traded on. “The Democrats are regaining control of Congress, but not of the key economic levers,” the firm said. The outcome was “a shift in governance rather than a change in the economic regime.” Congress can slow decisions. The president keeps the veto, and he still steers trade, regulation, customs and foreign policy. Investors, Oddo concluded, are treating the night as a political event rather than an economic shock. Democrats will not have the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto.
Trump told the New York Times he would accept the result. He also said he was ready to veto bills a Democratic Congress sends him. John Plassard, head of investment strategy at Cité Gestion, put the constraint the other way round: the president now has to deal with a Congress entirely controlled by the opposition, while the United States still faces persistent inflation, energy tension and a high cost of financing. Ipek Ozkardeskaya at Swissquote watched Asia, where technology-heavy indices fell on the fear of tighter scrutiny of artificial intelligence, for jobs and for the environment. She said the result could rotate money out of technology and into other parts of the market. That is a sector story. It is not a Swiss recession story.
Oil, and what Thursday is for
Oil did not celebrate either. Brent was up 0.16 per cent at 103.77 dollars a barrel in the European morning, and West Texas Intermediate was up 0.09 per cent at 96.18 dollars. Both are well below the 115 to 118 dollar range of the last week of October. The Middle East risk has not left the tape. It has stopped being the only number on it. October’s Swiss inflation print, 1.5 per cent, was a fuel bill. A Congress that cannot rewrite tariffs on its own does not, by itself, cheapen heating oil in Zurich.
The practical watchlist for a Swiss investor is short. Swiss Re’s figures land on Thursday. The National Bank’s next assessment is in December, with the policy rate still at zero. And the veto in Washington is now the constraint on everything Congress wants to do about prices, trade and technology. The SMI spent the morning saying it had already understood that. Swiss firms, surveyed before this result, are still planning pay rises of only 1 per cent for 2027.