The abrupt dismissal of Patrick Fischer, the long-serving head coach of Switzerland’s national ice hockey team, has ripped open a fault line that many had hoped was buried with the pandemic itself. Fischer lost his job not because of a poor season or a tactical failure, but because he presented a forged Covid-19 vaccination certificate. Viewed from Bern, where the federal administration spent months navigating the country’s fraught response to the virus, the affair is less about one man’s misjudgment than about a society that remains as polarised as it was in the darkest months of 2021.

The coach’s removal was met with fury from those who believe the pandemic restrictions were overblown, and with grim satisfaction from those who insist accountability must apply to all. The two camps, analysts in Zurich note, have done nothing to reconcile in the intervening years; merely speaking of the episode is enough to re-ignite the old anger. The shockwaves did not stop at the rink.

Pascal Schmitz, a journalist for the public broadcaster SRF who first reported the forgery, has himself been suspended from presenting the flagship evening programme “Schweiz aktuell”. The suspension followed the exhumation by the conservative weekly *Die Weltwoche* of Facebook posts Schmitz had written some fifteen years ago, in which he used racist and insulting language. SRF’s decision, though framed as a routine editorial review, was widely interpreted as a capitulation to the very same forces that had vilified Fischer’s sacking.

For critics in Geneva, the broadcaster has effectively rewarded a campaign of retaliation against a reporter who did his job. The twin developments expose something deeper than a sports scandal or a lapse in journalistic standards. Across the Cantons, from the Alemannic north to the Ticinese south, there is a palpable exhaustion with a past that refuses to stay in the past.

Official inquiries into the pandemic response have been timid and inconclusive; politicians have shied away from any systemic reckoning. As one commentator in the Tages-Anzeiger’s “Politbüro” podcast put it, there has been “simply no reappraisal of the pandemic”, while another dryly noted that not talking about it might itself be a deliberate strategy. That strategy is now failing.

The Fischer-Schmitz affair shows that the raw material of grievance and distrust remains abundant, and that even a minor trigger — a coach’s termination, a journalist’s old post — can detonate a debate the country has been studiously avoiding. Looking ahead, observers in London and Brussels will watch whether Switzerland’s fragmented federal system can produce any coherent lesson-learning mechanism, or whether the cycle of scandal and recrimination will simply continue. For now, the only certainty is that the pandemic’s ghost has not been laid to rest; it is merely waiting for the next provocateur to give it voice.