The Neue Zürcher Zeitung opens its economics page today with a headline that is at once dry and devastating: «The battle for the wealthy is intensifying.» Never before have so many millionaires emigrated — especially from Germany — and Switzerland is benefiting. The figure underpinning the article comes from the annual report by the London-based consultancy Henley & Partners: 165,000 millionaires are changing their main residence in 2025; a record that exceeds the previous record year (142,000 in 2024) by fourteen per cent. The German curve is the steepest in the world: from 24th to 19th to 13th place on the list of countries of origin — in the space of two years.

That is how we read the report. But Het Open Vizier has been reading this kind of report differently for the past two weeks. Since the introduction of Stemgedrag — the matrix file that arrives at projections by multiplying three axes — we have had a lens that turns the NZZ article into a case study. What the NZZ describes is neither accidental nor uniquely German. It is an outcome of the matrix once three inputs reinforce one another.

What is actually happening

The hard figures from the report, supplemented by the most recent quarterly flow, read like an X-ray:

Destination list 2026, according to Henley & Partners: Singapore, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Hong Kong, New Zealand — and in Southern Europe, notably Malta, Portugal and Cyprus. Countries on the loss list: the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Norway and South Korea. The rankings have turned on their head in two years.

The three axes

Stemgedrag describes every outcome as a product of three factors: party × person × baseline. That model was built for voting projections over fifteen years, but the clever thing is that it works just as well for migration behaviour. A millionaire who leaves is not a moral figure; it is a calculated outcome. Let us run through those three axes for the German case.

The party axis has become destabilising in Germany since the latest coalition formation. Not because one party is radical, but because the combination is radical. The debate over a wealth tax, combined with the excessive Wegzugsbesteuerung, raises the deduction intensity on the «fiscal predictability» axis from 4 to 8. In the matrix file, that is the difference between «annoying but liveable» and «strategically untenable».

The personal axis cannot be captured by an average. Anyone with money is, by definition, an unweighted point in the population. A pensioner with wealth invested in the stock market is more mobile than a dentist with a practice in Duisburg; a software entrepreneur with clients in San Francisco is more mobile than the dentist and the pensioner combined. The personal axis determines whether the push factor can translate into behaviour at all. Hence the statistical German worker stays — he cannot leave — while the statistical entrepreneur departs.

The baseline axis is the least discussed and the most decisive. Germany’s baseline is no longer what it was: dependence on exports to a weakening Chinese market, energy prices that have remained structurally higher since the Russian invasion, and a demographic trajectory in which the Leistungsträger cohorts retire and government spending per head rises. If that baseline weighs thirty per cent more heavily on a wealthy person’s calculations than it did ten years ago, then any party axis that scores even slightly higher on «redistribution» becomes the tipping point.

Party × Person × Baseline = Projection. Multiply an increased redistribution intensity by high personal mobility and a worsening baseline — and the outcome is not political. The outcome is an aeroplane seat.

Why Switzerland is benefiting (for now)

The NZZ presents Switzerland’s gains as a positive story, but in the matrix they are derivative. Switzerland has not suddenly begun offering more; the surrounding countries have begun offering less. As long as Switzerland’s fiscal predictability scores higher than that of Germany, France or the UK, the inflow is inevitable. Interestingly, the NZZ itself already identifies the first counterforce: a rising Wegzugsbesteuerung on Swiss territory, and the Steuerinitiative that proposed a 50% inheritance-tax rate on inheritances above fifty million. Switzerland, too, is beginning to burden its baseline. In the matrix, that is a warning signal with a delay of approximately three quarters.

Italy is doing even more spectacularly under the radar. Raising the flat tax from €200,000 to €300,000 has not slowed the inflow of wealthy people; it has accelerated it. The reason: the certainty of the amount counts for more than its size. Predictability beats progressivity — a matrix insight that every tax adviser immediately understands and every politician understands very slowly.

What this says about the Netherlands

The Netherlands does not feature prominently on any list in the report. That is not because nothing is happening; it is because the Dutch curve is still flat. The baseline is not yet heavy enough, and the party axis is not yet high enough. But the same three axes are being set up. Box 3 revisions that will subject wealth to a heavier burden, a nitrogen baseline that undermines predictability for entrepreneurs, and a political axis that has shifted towards more redistribution since 2024 — it is the same multiplication that Germany is going through, two to four years behind Germany. Those who see the German curve are looking at the Dutch mirror of 2028.

This is not intended as a catastrophe. It is intended as a prediction. The matrix makes no apocalyptic claims; it merely calculates what happens when you allow three axes to multiply without lightening any one of them. If keeping productive people from leaving matters — and it matters to Het Open Vizier — then one axis must be lightened somewhere. Tax pressure, the mobility threshold, or baseline deterioration; choose one and ease it seriously. If you do not, the Netherlands will appear on the H&P loss list in four years, and we will explain here why that, mathematically speaking, was no surprise.