Famous Swiss Leaders

Johann Rupert is a South African-born businessman best known as the son of famous business magnate Anton Rupert. Johann is currently serving as the chairman of a luxury goods company called Richemont. In 2019, he was named the second-wealthiest person in South Africa when he was featured in Forbes magazine's The World's Billionaires list.

Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian socialist and anarchist. He is credited with founding an anarchist school of thought called collectivist anarchism. Regarded as one of the most influential personalities of anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin has had a major influence on thinkers like Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, Errico Malatesta, Neil Postman, E. P. Thompson, and A. S. Neill.    

While Simonetta Sommaruga has been the president of Switzerland, she is also a talented pianist, trained at the Lucerne School of Music. She later dropped out of a university English course. She has also been the director of the Consumer Protection Foundation and part of committees on energy and the environment.

John Sutter, also known as Don Juan Sutter, was a German-born Swiss colonizer who established Sutter's Fort, or modern-day Sacramento, the capital of California. After one of his employees, a carpenter named James W. Marshall, found gold in his area in 1848, the California Gold Rush began.

The current president of Switzerland and FDP.The Liberals politician, Ignazio Cassis is also a qualified doctor of internal medicine, who has previously led the Swiss Medical Association as its vice president. He is also fluent in German, French, and Italian, and was initially an Italian citizen.

Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle served as the President of Chile from 1994 to 2000. Under his presidency, poverty in Chile decreased and improvements were made in education and health sectors. An important politician, Frei also served as the President of the Senate of Chile from 2006 to 2008.

François Bonivard was a nobleman and historian whose life was the inspiration for Lord Byron's 1816 poem The Prisoner of Chillon. He was a partisan of the Protestant Reformation and a Geneva patriot at the time of the Republic of Geneva. His life was tumultuous, and by most accounts, he was a libertine. He was married four times.

Niklaus Manuel Deutsch was not just a soldier and a statesman from Switzerland, but also a talented painter. A major figure of Swiss Renaissance art, he was initially inspired by Italian painters and later included mythological and spiritual themes in his works such as Pyramus and Thisbe.