Switzerland, The Golden Cage · Satire and opinion

Granit Xhaka and the immortal certificate: in Switzerland, the virus passes; the paperwork stays

The Granit Xhaka affair revives the most resilient Swiss variant of all: the administrative procedure.

By Leonardo Mascia · 22 September 2026

Satirical illustration: an enormous Swiss judge, two officers holding an expired Covid certificate, and a tiny Granit Xhaka beside stacks of files. — The certificate has expired. The file is in remarkably good health. A satirical illustration, not a photograph of the proceedings.

Granit Xhaka has admitted buying a Covid vaccination certificate without having the vaccination. He has apologised, said that he will cooperate with the authorities and will not attend the Swiss national team’s next training camp. 1

That is everything we need to know about Granit Xhaka.

Because Xhaka is not the main character in this story. He is merely the paper clip Switzerland has used to reopen the pandemic ring binder.

A binder which, evidently, had never quite been closed.

The immortal variant

Some countries put their emergencies behind them.

Switzerland hole-punches them, files them alphabetically and summons them for questioning once the rest of the world has forgotten the password to the QR code.

More than five years after Covid certificates were introduced, with restrictions gone, apps uninstalled and millions of people unable to remember how many doses they were supposed to have had before being allowed into a restaurant, the Lucerne public prosecutor is still pursuing a document from 2022.

The medical practice involved had already come under investigation in 2023. 2

Then the file waited.

Quietly.

With discipline.

It accrued administrative seniority and, three years later, reached the captain of the national team.

Swiss justice rather resembles a glacier: slow, cold and generally considered majestic because nobody quite dares ask whether it is travelling in the right direction.

The virus mutates.

The virus disappears.

The file does not.

The file remains in the system, in excellent health, entirely symptom-free and with a life expectancy exceeding that of the people inside it.

Organised idiocy

Calling all this ‘stupidity’ would be unkind.

Stupidity is spontaneous. Untidy. Occasionally even inventive.

This is organised idiocy: numbered, logged, digitally signed and filed as a PDF.

It is the distinctly Swiss ability to apply, with absolute precision, a procedure that has ceased to serve any practical purpose. A higher form of efficiency: arriving punctually at entirely the wrong place.

Public health is no longer the issue. That certificate will protect nobody today. It will prevent no infection, free up no hospital ward and bring no pandemic to a retrospective halt.

But the system has identified a discrepancy.

And a discrepancy, in Switzerland, is more dangerous than a disease.

If the database says one thing and reality says another, the database is not corrected.

Reality is brought in for questioning.

Peace of mind for the national team

The Swiss Football Association has announced that Xhaka will miss the next gathering ‘in the best interest of the team’. 1

The team, then, has been saved.

North Macedonia can face Switzerland secure in the knowledge that no health certificate dating from 2022 will compromise the moral purity of midfield.

It is a thoroughly Swiss solution: when reality becomes noisy, temporarily remove the person and retain the agenda.

This is no longer about vaccination, infection or safety.

It is about institutional peace and quiet.

And institutional peace and quiet comes first in Switzerland. Even before the person who must be temporarily removed to secure it.

The doors are always closed most politely.

Five years, in theory

The newspapers have even mentioned a possible five-year prison sentence. That is the theoretical maximum for certain document-forgery offences, not a realistic prediction of what will happen. 3

Still, the image is rather splendid.

In 2026, the Swiss Criminal Code is being symbolically mobilised against a QR code from the era when we disinfected packets of pasta and followed sticky arrows across supermarket floors to prevent two human beings meeting beside the frozen peas.

The law is the law, of course.

Even when common sense cannot be supplied in triplicate.

The point is not what punishment Xhaka will receive. It is how much solemnity the system can still concentrate on a document that no longer protects anyone.

Solemnity, intact.

Sterile.

Perfectly preserved.

Vaccination without the catechism

The pandemic was not imaginary.

What was imaginary was the notion that every decision taken during it automatically became an intelligent one.

Vaccine adverse effects were not imaginary either. Swissmedic acknowledged myocarditis and pericarditis following mRNA vaccination as very rare events, observed more frequently after the second dose and in younger men. 4

That does not establish the more extreme theories circulated in the years that followed.

It establishes something rather simpler: not every doubt was madness, science was not standing still, and knowledge was changing while millions of people were being invited to behave as though every answer had already been finalised.

Reality was complicated.

The system needed it to be binary.

Green or red.

Valid or invalid.

Responsible or irresponsible.

Doubt was no longer treated as a human or scientific condition. It had become a moral failing. One was allowed to be frightened, provided the fear went through the proper channels. Questions were permitted, provided the answers had already been approved.

You could make decisions about your own body, on the understanding that you reached the correct decision.

Switzerland had not eliminated uncertainty.

It had made it administratively inadmissible.

The Fifth Amendment and the registered letter

In July 2026, Anthony Fauci appeared before a US Senate committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer more than a hundred questions. 5

That establishes neither guilt nor innocence. It is a constitutional right.

It does, however, suggest that he has excellent lawyers.

While the world is still debating the origins of the virus, institutional transparency, decisions taken and mistakes made, Switzerland has identified its historic priority: checking a midfielder’s Covid certificate.

The United States has the Fifth Amendment.

Switzerland has the fifth reminder, sent by registered post.

At the top of institutions, responsibility becomes complex, collective, technical and difficult to attribute.

By the time we reach the individual citizen, everything has suddenly become reassuringly straightforward.

There is a box.

The box has been filled in incorrectly.

The system responds.

I had seen this one before

In my book, Switzerland, The Golden Cage, I described pandemic bureaucracy making its way into private life: certificates, registrations, checks, suspicions, a family emergency and, eventually, proceedings closed for insufficient evidence.

The pandemic ended.

The file fancied one last farewell tour.

That was when I understood a fundamental rule: the system does not necessarily need a virus to produce symptoms.

It can manage perfectly well on its own.

There is something deeply Swiss even about an irregularity. Rigidity does not eliminate improvisation: it registers it. In other countries, absurdity is chaotic. In Switzerland, it has a reference number.

People change.

Recommendations change.

Scientific knowledge changes.

Certificates expire.

The system retains.

What is really on trial

The interesting question is not what ought to happen to Granit Xhaka.

It is why, in 2026, an entire apparatus still feels the need to demonstrate its authority through a certificate that no longer serves a purpose.

Perhaps the system is not pursuing the document.

It is pursuing disobedience.

Because a state can admit that a rule has become pointless. What it finds considerably harder to accept is that someone chose to evade it while that rule was still sacred.

The false certificate then becomes more than a document.

It becomes a retrospective affront to order.

A reminder that, even at the height of collective pressure, someone had failed to believe quite enough.

And that is what the machinery cannot bring itself to file away.

Switzerland learns from its mistakes.

Preferably after numbering, classifying and saving them as a PDF.

Covid has passed.

The certificate has stayed.

Because Switzerland is no longer defending public health. It is retrospectively defending the notion that it never overreacted.

And that, unlike a Covid pass, has no expiry date.

Sources and references

Satire and opinion. References to Covid being over concern the emergency phase: SARS-CoV-2 continues to circulate, as the WHO explains. The sources document the reported events; the judgements about institutions are the author’s.