The posse around SRF commentator Sascha Ruefer is heading towards Easter. The football commentator had remove a sentence from a documentary about the Swiss national football team permit. Rufer had said about Nati star Granit Xhaka that he was “a lot, but not Swiss”.
It is still unclear in which context the sentence fell. But the TV man is already being accused of racism.
Cédric Wermuth, National Councilor and Co-President of SP Switzerland, does not want to stand aside either. “Granit is now a normal Swiss name like Markus or Andrea,” says the politician.
Maybe he meant it symbolically. In fact, the statement is certainly daring. This is confirmed by the figures from the Federal Statistical Office.
Between 2000 and 2021 the first name Granite was given 64 times at birth in Switzerland. In three of those years no one ever baptized their child that way.
For comparison: the first name Andrea was chosen 1044 times in the same period. After all, Markus had 302 births, with Wermuth unerringly choosing a boy name that was gradually dying out.
If he had chosen Luca for his claim, one of the best sellers of recent years, the comparison would have been even more steep: 9472 of them were born in the last twenty years.
The 64 granites in Switzerland still have a bit of catching up to do, until the name in each yodel choir is represented.
“Cédric” has even better chances. There have been 969 of them since 2000.