GESDA Summit 2026: “Anticipation is not prediction. It is preparation, guided by care and humility”

Genf, 14.10.2026 — Opening address by Alexandre Fasel, State Secretary at the FDFA, at the Anticipation Summit organised by the foundation Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) in Geneva. Check against delivery.

Honourable Ministers,
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,

Sixteen years ago this month, on 15 October 2010, deep beneath the Gotthard, this great Alpine massif connecting the north and south of Europe, a drill head broke through the last metres of rock.

For years, two teams had been digging towards each other through the mountain, one from the north, the other one from the south, at times beneath more than two thousand metres of rock. They never saw each other. Ahead of them lay rock no one had ever seen, and with every metre came the quiet risk that they might miss each other in the dark.

They did not. When the last rock gave way, the two tunnels met with a deviation of only eight centimetres sideways and one centimetre in height, in a tunnel fifty-seven kilometres long.

But my point is not the moment itself. It is everything that came before it. The Swiss people approved the project at the ballot box in 1992, eighteen years before the breakthrough and twenty-four years before the tunnel opened for operations in 2016. What followed the popular vote were nearly two decades of calculating, measuring and correcting, so that the two teams would meet in the middle of a mountain.

A breakthrough of this kind is no stroke of luck. It is a success that is the result of thorough preparation, built on the best knowledge available and achieved in a joint effort.

Science has always dug from one side of the mountain. You, the scientists in this room, push forward into what is possible. You do not always know what lies behind the next metre of rock. That is the very essence of research.