If you’ve been living here for a few months, you’ve probably noticed that the country isn’t exactly homogeneous. But the day someone explains the ‘Röstigraben’ to you, it all starts to make sense.
The term comes from ‘Rösti’ (the traditional potato dish of German-speaking Switzerland) and ‘Graben’ (moat, trench). It is the word people use to describe the invisible border separating German-speaking Switzerland from French-speaking Switzerland. The line roughly follows the River Saane/Sarine in the canton of Fribourg and the River Broyé. To the west, French. To the east, German. And with the language, almost everything else changes.
The mood changes. Our relationship with time changes. The aperitif begins at 6 pm in Geneva and at 5.47 pm in Bern, and that in itself says something. Our relationship with the state changes too. And politics, above all.
In almost every major federal vote, German-speaking Switzerland and French-speaking Switzerland vote differently. The most famous example was in 1992: Switzerland voted on joining the European Economic Area; French-speaking Switzerland voted ‘yes’ by a large majority, whilst German-speaking Switzerland voted ‘no’ – and only just. The ‘no’ vote won overall. The French-speaking newspapers at the time dubbed it ‘the night of the long knives’. And the voting differences between the two regions have been repeated in dozens of referendums since then.
For those of us from Spain, the Röstigraben has a special significance: we arrive in a country that, on the surface, seems to function as a unified whole, and it takes us a while to spot the divide. Once you see it, you can’t help but notice it.