On Tuesday afternoon, four people sat down in front of the Swiss press in Bern and said the thing that everybody in the country had suspected for two years but nobody in government would confirm. There was never a fixed price for the F-35.

The report came from the Geschäftsprüfungskommission of the National Council, the GPK-N, Switzerland’s parliamentary oversight committee. It had been digging since July 2025 into a single question: did Switzerland really negotiate a lump-sum, all-in price with the United States for 36 F-35A Lightning II fighters, the way the defence ministry told Parliament and the public it had? The answer, published on 8 September 2026, runs to a formal finding that no such price was ever agreed.

The reaction from Bern was not measured. Within hours, politicians from the left and the hard right were using words that rarely make it into Swiss defence coverage: Skandal. Sauerei. And, from one member of the security policy committee, the accusation that a former Federal Councillor had lied to Parliament’s face.

The price that was never a price

Switzerland voted for new fighters on 27 September 2020 and it was close enough to make your palms sweat: the Air2030 credit passed with 50.14 per cent, a margin of 8,670 votes out of more than three million cast. In June 2021 the Federal Council picked the F-35A. In September 2022 Parliament released the money, and on 19 September 2022 the contract was signed.

Throughout, the selling point was the price. Not an estimate, not a ceiling with caveats — a fixed price. That certainty is a large part of why a narrowly split electorate and a sceptical Parliament went along with it.

The GPK-N now states flatly that no lump-sum fixed price was agreed with the United States, and that against that background the defence ministry’s absolute communication towards Parliament and the public cannot be understood. The committee also found it implausible that Washington would have handed Switzerland a deal that runs against standard US Foreign Military Sales practice in the first place.

Almost nobody read the contract

The detail that stings hardest is not about money at all. It is about diligence. According to the committee, only a handful of the people involved ever read the contract in full — which meant the negotiated result was never properly stress-tested before Switzerland signed it.

“Too few people engaged intensively and in detail with the contract, which meant that the negotiated result was not questioned critically enough.”

Priska Wismer-Felder — President of the GPK-N, speaking at the report’s press conference (translated from German)

It gets stranger. The GPK-N found that the general secretariat of the defence ministry brought in an external law firm alongside armasuisse, the federal armaments office, with the result that armasuisse’s own legal service was effectively left out of the contract negotiation. The justification, according to subcommittee president David Roth, was that the departmental leadership judged armasuisse’s lawyers not to have the necessary competence — a striking verdict on the very body whose statutory job is federal arms procurement.

The external firm then assessed the paperwork primarily under Swiss law and said openly that it could not judge the documents under US law. It recommended bringing in an American firm. That recommendation, Roth said, was not followed.

Meanwhile the Swiss Federal Audit Office had already raised doubts about the supposed lump-sum price. The committee’s view is blunt: those doubts alone should have triggered a critical review and renegotiation, or at the very least should have put a cost-overrun risk into the risk register. Neither happened.

August 2024, and then silence until March 2025

Here is the timeline that turned a procurement story into a political one. Armasuisse received the first indications of extra costs in August 2024, and Viola Amherd, then head of the defence ministry, was aware of them. She informed the full Federal Council only in March 2025, once the United States had confirmed the additional costs in writing.

By March 2025 Amherd had already announced her resignation — she made that public on 15 January 2025 and left office at the end of March. Her successor, Martin Pfister, was elected on 12 March 2025 and took over the department on 1 April.

«Sauerei»

SVP National Councillor Mauro Tuena sat on the security policy committee from the end of 2021 to the end of 2023 and chaired it. He is not a man with a reflexive grudge against buying fighter jets. He is furious anyway.

“The findings of this report are a disgrace. Former Federal Councillor Viola Amherd lied to us through her teeth.”

Mauro Tuena — SVP National Councillor and member of the Security Policy Committee, speaking to 20 Minuten (translated from German)

Tuena told 20 Minuten that the committee had repeatedly asked to see the contracts and had repeatedly been refused, on the grounds that such contracts are never shown to committees. That, he says, is over: the committee has told Defence Minister Martin Pfister it wants to see every contract in future, and the Federal Council has agreed. In his words, he will never again approve a single franc before he has seen the contract.

From the other end of the chamber, SP co-president Cédric Wermuth called the report confirmation of what the F-35 procurement was from the beginning and still is — an absolute scandal — and said Parliament and the public had been misled. The SP and the Greens both want the purchase stopped outright; Green National Councillor Gerhard Andrey said in a statement that Parliament and the population had been led astray by the Federal Council.

The parties on the right want the opposite. As we reported on 7 September, the SVP and FDP are pushing to restore the full order of 36 jets rather than settle for the roughly 30 the supplementary credit buys.

A German-language explainer on how the Swiss F-35 cost dispute developed and what it means for other European buyers.

What the committee actually wants

The recommendations are less quotable than the outrage but they are the part that will outlast it. The GPK-N wants the Federal Council to examine measures ensuring that federal staff actually file documents as the rules require — including possible sanctions for former employees, and the archiving of business-relevant Threema messages. It found that some documents had not been filed according to the applicable rules at all, leaving the record incomplete.

It wants armasuisse, not a ministry general secretariat, to lead the legal assessment of arms deals. It wants clearer negotiating mandates, more precise financial forecasts and more transparency on large procurements. And it wants the invoicing and invoice checking in this specific case reviewed.

None of that arrives in time to change the aircraft. Switzerland’s first F-35A is already being built — the fuselage and wing came together at Cameri in Italy in August, and deliveries in the United States are due from 2027. The jets are coming. What the GPK-N has taken away is the story that was told to get them, and the assumption that the next time a Swiss defence minister says the price is fixed, anyone will believe it.

Sources: Geschäftsprüfungskommission des Nationalrats report of 8 September 2026 (via SRF, Tages-Anzeiger, NZZ), 20 Minuten, watson, Blick.