{"id":65660,"date":"2026-05-15T02:19:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T02:19:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/65660\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T02:19:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T02:19:12","slug":"geneva-is-paying-the-price-of-trumps-retreat-from-the-un-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/65660\/","title":{"rendered":"Geneva is paying the price of Trump\u2019s retreat from the UN \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

First, it was Switzerland\u2019s neutrality that made it a convenient host: The Red Cross was founded here in 1863, and the first Geneva Convention signed the following year. The League of Nations arrived in 1920, and when it collapsed after World War II, the U.N. Secretariat inherited its infrastructure. Many agencies and NGOs followed, like bees gathering around a queen, forming a dense international hub. And for decades, this hub buzzed year-round.<\/p>\n

Today, however, it is contracting. And the move away from Geneva has consequences that reach well beyond the neighborhood and into the city itself.<\/p>\n

The diplomatic pole of the local economy represents about 11.4 percent of Geneva\u2019s GDP<\/a>. \u201cThere is an entire local economy built around Geneva that is tied to this. It\u2019s a massive loss of earnings because you have thousands of families leaving \u2014 the impact is both enormous and negative,\u201d said Fanny Badache, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po Paris.<\/p>\n

Outgoing Geneva Mayor Alfonso Gomez is worried as well. When international employees leave the city, other jobs unrelated to the cuts are also lost, he said: \u201cSeveral thousand jobs at some point risk disappearing directly. So, it will, of course, also have repercussions in terms of indirect employment.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not all bad news though, as the move away from Geneva may ease one long-standing pressure: housing. The canton\u2019s vacancy rate stands at 0.34 percent <\/a>\u2014 that\u2019s four empty units for every 1,000 homes. For comparison, Brussels\u2019 vacancy rate stands between 1.5 and 3 percent. High salaries in both the international and finance sectors, coupled with strong demand, have driven prices up.<\/p>\n

But the city\u2019s more pressing real-estate concern is office oversupply. And if the international pole continues to shrink, significant volumes of office space will be left vacant \u2014 especially in the nonresidential International Geneva.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"First, it was Switzerland\u2019s neutrality that made it a convenient host: The Red Cross was founded here in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65661,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[30504,35793,1701,27896,35794,2115,496,18,65,2704,8711,17,9752,7330],"class_list":{"0":"post-65660","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-geneva","8":"tag-affordable-housing","9":"tag-aid-and-development","10":"tag-antonio-guterres","11":"tag-cities","12":"tag-cost-of-living","13":"tag-development","14":"tag-diplomacy","15":"tag-donald-trump","16":"tag-geneva","17":"tag-mike-waltz","18":"tag-ngos","19":"tag-switzerland","20":"tag-u-s-foreign-policy","21":"tag-unemployment"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116576201160672953","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}