Paying more for car insurance simply because you’re from Turkey or Serbia? This is standard in Switzerland. Anyone who wants to insure their car here as a foreigner pays a flat rate more than a Swiss citizen. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve had an accident or are driving a fast car.
The insurance companies sometimes differentiate according to nationality, who has to pay how much. And the differences are massive: Albanians, Serbs and Turks in particular have to accept hefty surcharges – on average they pay around 60 percent more than the Swiss, shows an analysis of the Internet comparison portal Comparis.ch.
It’s all a question of numbers
How can that be? Blick asked the insurance companies Axa, Helvetia, TCS and Zürich Versicherung. They explain the difference as follows: For the premium calculation, it is determined which factors could statistically lead to high costs. These include, for example, the performance of the car, the age of the driver, gender or nationality.
So if a man of foreign descent causes an accident in a high-horsepower car, this is included in the statistics. If this happens several times, a risk profile is created that is applied to all people with the same ancestry.
«This is a rip-off»
For Mustafa Atici (51), the president of the SP Migrant :innen Schweiz, the practice is pure discrimination. “This is a rip-off,” says the SP National Council from Basel. “Thousands of people have to pay a flat rate more without ever causing an accident.”
He knows that young drivers with fast cars and often with a migrant background are more often involved in accidents. “That’s why punishing everyone with the same nationality across the board is not fair.” One should punish those who are also to blame.
Atici tries to draw attention to the topic with campaigns in different languages. He advises migrants to take out insurance where no distinction is made between Swiss and foreigners.
Banned in the EU
But that should be difficult. Because in Switzerland there is no insurer that does not take nationality into account. Until now, Generali was the only insurance company that made no distinction between foreigners and Swiss. But Generali has deviated from that.
In the past, the statistics did not show any higher risks from foreigners. “With the current data and calculation models, however, differences between the various nationalities can be identified,” says media spokesman Ueli Kneubühler. That is why nationality is now also taken into account in the premium calculation.
In the European Union, parentage may not play a role in the price of the premium. In Switzerland, it is, as far as it can be statistically proven that foreigners actually cause higher costs.
In Switzerland, every insurance company consults its own loss statistics. And every insurance company evaluates the nationality factor differently. Only one thing is always the same: the Swiss pay less.