Even the insurance company that picks the tab is called ZURICH! I mean imagine insurance company caller Bern giving you money for burnt car lol

Funny story regarding that company;

When we were living in the UK, my wife (Swiss) was trying to get car insurance with her Swiss license. The first place she tried was Zürich - the person on the phone said;

"We don't insure on Swiss licenses!"

"But you're a Swiss company!"

"Oh, are we?"

Agree with you on that! The Trivial Pursuit angle.
Maybe we could rename Brussels as EUROCITY.....
capital of Europe and easy for our American cousins to remember!
Always trying to be helpful wherever possible!

Slight problem, Eurocity already exists. It is the transborder conurbation of the two cites of Haperanda, Sweden and Torino, Finland!

Plus for Brussels, it would have to be Eurocité/Eurostad (+Eurostadt).

Haparanda and Tornio - just in case people want to look on the map.

Simple solution: Eurocapital / Eurocapitale / EuroKapitale

I said it bevor and I say it again "Nobody moves anything till I say so"

What's wrong with Europolis....? Sounds too Greek to Germans' ears ?

Yay. LostInbroad for president,or prime-minister or whatever it is. Maybe just make him king.

Newcastle is the capital of England......well as far as I am concerned

[QUOTE=Medea Fleecestealer;1596562]Just seen an article on the bluewin website saying that there may be a popular petition to put forward Zurich to become the capital of Switzerland instead of Bern. Good idea or not? Thoughts?

Not a good idea for any country really to change the capital city. I heard it cost around 12 billion CHF to have Berlin as the capital of Germany again as opposed to Bonn.

Anyway the capital of Switzerland should be "S" ;-)

I really don't see the point of making Zürich the political capital of Switzerland. To me it doesn't really make sense. There's always been a balance here - Zürich does the financial stuff, Basel does the chemical and medicine stuff, Geneva does the UN and French stuff, and Bern does the political stuff. Why change it.

Ok, that's somewhat simplistic, but Zürich is already prohibitively expensive for most mortals, and bringing the politics here is just going to increase that problem, and quite possibly leave Bern as a ghost city.

My vote, if I had one, NO

[QUOTE=alanshearer;1598853] The 12 bio CHF figure is wrong in a way. Why ? Because
- the divided metropolis needed to be "put together" again
- East Berlin needed to get upgraded
- the infrastructure needed to be re-built

And all this was due anyway.

Add to this that not only do the Federal Ministries of Germany have a second base in Bonn, but the Ministries of
- agriculture
- defence
- health
- environment
- education
- economic co-operation & development
even have their main HQ in Bonn

In case of Italy, many government activities take place in Milano, just as in case of Turkey, many government activities take place in Istanbul. In the Netherlands, you have BOTH Amsterdam and Den Haag in "Capital roles" and in South Africa Johannesburg & Pretoria & CapeTown.

Sure, DEcentralising is not free-of-charge, and for example the French move to push ministries out of the central downtown to more peripheral places as not free-of-charge either, but improved things a lot

Right, except that Zürich is doing the
- economic stuff (finance just a part of it)
- traffic stuff

AND to relocate ministries out of Bern (not necessarily to Zürich) would relieve Bern of part of what is rather a burden and would create space for enterprise in Bern.

Suprem commander

It will never happend :d

Negative ! He was never in the army

Note that Bern is not the capital of Switzerland. All Swiss know that officially speaking the country has no capital, just a federal city.

Anyway, the idea is sick. Zurich has too many things and it already accepted to get compensated with the ETHZurich for not getting the federal administration, and it also has the main offices of the SNB.

Although I could maybe support a distribution along the territory of some major institutions. Zurich already got the SNB, maybe Geneva could get an important ministry, Lausanne the CFF, and so on and so forth, at least in those cantons negatively affected by the péréquation financière... did you know for example that Geneva contributes over 80% the amount of canton Zurich? Given their different population size and how the federal administration continously ignores the canton in terms of infrastructure investment compared to others this is quite a feat.

Geneva already has the U.N.O.

contributes 80% ?? of what ?

the federal adminstration does NOT ignore Geneva. But to get federal money you have to make investments by your Canton, and then the union contributes a fixed percentage

Geneva has the handicap of being a "city-state" with a fairly small "countryside" which means that the Canton of Geneva does not get much agricultural subsidies

the "reluctance" of the voters of the Canton of Geneva to support public transport also played its role

geneva got the UN thanks to its own merits (red cross first, then as a consequence société de nations, then the UN), not because the confederation decided to present only one candidate from the country, and besides these are agencies financed by other countries not by Switzerland, so you're pretty much mixing apples and oranges.