Switzerland's Heat Death Toll Is 174. Its Green Party Leader Wants Her Colleague Fired for It.

Green Party leader Lisa Mazzone wants Environment Minister Albert Rösti removed over heatwave failures after 174 excess elderly deaths in June — but she's making the demand largely alone, even as a second heat wave and ongoing ecological crisis give her argument concrete weight.

AI-Generated · openrouter/xiaomi/mimo-v2.5-pro

— 4 mins read

During the week of June 22–28, 2026, Switzerland recorded 1,278 deaths among people aged 65 and older — 174 more than the 1,104 statistically forecast for that week, according to data from the Federal Statistical Office monitored on behalf of federal authorities by the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. The country was already deep into its second record-breaking heatwave of the year — temperatures reaching up to 35°C, Level 3 heatwave warnings in place since July 6 — when Green Party President Lisa Mazzone called for Environment Minister Albert Rösti to be stripped of his portfolio, accusing him of failing to protect the population and of ruining Switzerland’s climate policy.

Her specific charges extended beyond the heat deaths themselves: drought gripping Swiss farmland, farmers crying for help, fish dying in rivers running too low for survival. Rösti, who heads the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications — known in Switzerland as DETEC or UVEK — has been a frequent target of environmental groups, but Mazzone’s demand went well beyond policy criticism. Any other government minister would be better, she said, positioning the removal as a necessary act rather than a symbolic one.

She is largely alone in that position. Even left-leaning parties that share the Green Party’s substantive objections to Rösti’s environmental record — the SP, GLP, and the Center Party — agreed with some of her criticism but opposed actually removing him. The SVP, Rösti’s own party, backs him without reservation. Bluewin characterized Mazzone as making the kind of demand that even sympathetic allies consider excessive under the circumstances.

The timing, though, is difficult to argue away. The June heatwave killed 174 more over-65s than were forecast to die that week — a number that likely understates the full toll, since it captures only the week with the sharpest deviation from baseline mortality, not the days on either side when heat-related deaths may have been elevated without reaching statistical significance. The second wave, which drove Swiss federal authorities to issue public warnings beginning July 6, was still ongoing as of mid-July, with warnings extended through at least July 13 — and Mazzone made her demand on July 23, meaning the crisis had stretched from one heat-related mortality spike into a prolonged, overlapping sequence of waves.

For the politicians who agreed with some of Mazzone’s criticism but wouldn’t go as far as removal, the calculus is straightforward: Switzerland’s federal executive already balances seven ministers from four parties under the magic formula that has governed cabinet composition for decades, and firing a sitting minister mid-crisis over a policy disagreement — even one backed by an unflattering death toll — is constitutionally and politically uncharted territory. For Mazzone, the calculus looks different: when the population the minister is supposed to protect is dying in above-forecast numbers during the events specifically within his portfolio’s remit, asking for a different minister is the proportional response.

Neither side is disputing that 230 people died prematurely in Swiss heatwaves this summer, or that drought is devastating farmers and killing fish across the country. The disagreement is about what that toll asks of Swiss politics — and whether the answer is a different person in Rösti’s chair, or simply better policy from whoever happens to be sitting in it.

Sources