Switzerland’s $6.5 billion fighter decision nears after years of delay

Switzerland’s government was meeting on Wednesday to pick a next-generation fighter plane after a decade-long political tug-of-war over a 6 billion Swiss franc ($6.5 billion) contest among bidders from Europe and the United States.

Contenders include the Rafale from France’s Dassault, Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet, Lockheed Martin’s F35-A Lightning II and the four-nation Eurofighter built by Germany and Spain backed Airbus, Italy’s Leonardo and Britain’s BAE Systems.

Swiss television reported last week that the F-35 provided the best technical and financial features in a Swiss evaluation, but the final decision was still open.

A deal by Switzerland with a European manufacturer could be seen as an attempt by Bern to heal relations with the European Union after the collapse of talks earlier this year about a new agreement to regulate their ties, analysts said.

Neutral Switzerland last year narrowly approved the funding for new fighters in a national referendum.

Opinion polls had shown the plan would easily win approval in a country where armed neutrality is a tradition, but only 50.2% of voters approved the funding in September.

The result is being closely watched as the first of three face-offs ahead of procurement decisions in Finland and Canada.

Switzerland’s latest bid to procure fighters is driven by a pressing need to replace ageing Northrop F-5E/F Tiger II and its 30 Boeing F/A-18 Hornet combat jets, which go out of service in 2030.

Seven migrants drown as boat capsizes off Italy’s Lampedusa
At least seven migrants, one of them pregnant, drowned after a boat carrying them capsized five miles off the Italian island of Lampedusa early on Wednesday, officials said.

About 10 other people were missing, Luigi Patronaggio, the chief prosecutor of a team leading investigations into the deaths, told Reuters.

The migrants are believed to have started their journey in Tunisia, said Patronaggio, who is working with magistrates based in the Sicilian city of Agrigento.

“This latest tragedy in the Mediterranean is heartbreaking, I wonder what else has to happen to make Italy and Europe understand that we cannot go on like this,” Lampedusa’s mayor, Toto Martello, said.

Coastguard units managed to rescue about 46 other migrants from the 8-metre-long boat after it overturned, and bring them back to Lampedusa, officials said.

More than 250 more migrants landed on the tiny island overnight on four other ships, local media reported.

Arrivals in Italy – one of the main migrant routes into Europe – had been falling in recent years, but numbers picked up again in 2021.

Almost 19,800 migrants have arrived since the beginning of the year – many of them fleeing conflict and poverty in Africa and the Middle East – against just over 6,700 in the same period last year, Interior Ministry figures show.