The Neue Zürcher Zeitung opens its economy page today with a title that is both dry and devastating: «Der Kampf um die Wohlhabenden spitzt zich zu.» Never before have so many millionaires emigrated — especially from Germany — and Switzerland is reaping the benefits. The figure anchoring the piece comes from the annual report by the London-based consultancy Henley & Partners: 165.000 millionaires are relocating their primary residence in 2025; a record that surpasses the previous record year (142.000 in 2024) by fourteen percent. The German curve is the sharpest in the world: from rank 24 to rank 19 to rank 13 on the list of source countries — in the space of two years.

That is how we read the news. But Het Open Vizier has been reading these kinds of reports differently for the past two weeks. Since the introduction of Stemgedrag — the matrix file that generates projections by multiplying three axes — we have a lens that converts the NZZ article into a case study. What the NZZ describes is no coincidence and is not uniquely German. It is an outcome of the matrix as soon as three inputs reinforce one another.

What is actually happening

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

Destination list for 2026, according to Henley & Partners: Singapore, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Hong Kong, New Zealand — and in Southern Europe, specifically Malta, Portugal, Cyprus. Loser list: United Kingdom, Germany, France, Norway, South Korea. The rankings have flipped 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 interesting thing is that it works just as well for migration behavior. A millionaire who departs is not a moral figure; they are a calculation outcome. Let’s walk through those three axes for the German case study.

The party axis in Germany has become disruptive since the formation of the last coalition. Not because one party is radical, but because the combination becomes radical. The discussion about 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 livable» and «strategically unsustainable».

The person axis cannot be captured in an average. Anyone with money is, by definition, an unweighted point in the population. A retiree with assets on 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 retiree combined. The person axis determines whether the push factor can be converted into behavior at all. Hence why the statistical German worker stays — he cannot — and the statistical entrepreneur leaves.

The baseline axis is the least discussed and the most decisive. Germany's baseline is no longer what it once was: export dependency on a weakening Chinese market, energy prices that are structurally higher after the Russian invasion, a demographic trajectory in which the Leistungsträger cohorts are retiring and state spending per capita is rising. If that baseline weighs thirty percent more on a wealthy individual’s balance sheet than it did ten years ago, then any party axis that scores even slightly higher on «redistribution» is 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 airplane seat.

Why Switzerland (still) benefits

The NZZ frames the Swiss gain as a positive story, but in the matrix, it is a derivative. Switzerland doesn't suddenly have more to offer; its neighboring countries have less to offer. As long as Switzerland’s fiscal predictability scores higher than the fiscal predictability of Germany, France, or the UK, the inflow is natural. Interestingly, the NZZ itself already mentions the first counterforce: a rising Wegzugsbesteuerung on Swiss soil, the Steuerinitiative that speculated with a 50% rate on inheritances over fifty million. Switzerland too is beginning to weigh down its baseline. In the matrix, that is a warning signal with a lag of about three quarters.

Italy is doing something more spectacular under the radar. The increase of the flat tax from €200,000 to €300,000 has not slowed the inflow of the wealthy; it has accelerated it. Reason: the certainty of the amount carries more weight than the amount itself. Predictability beats progressivity — that is a matrix insight that every tax specialist understands immediately and every politician very slowly.

What this says about the Netherlands

The Netherlands does not appear prominently on any list in the report. This is not because nothing is happening; it is because the Dutch curve is still flat. The baseline is not yet heavy enough, the party axis not yet high enough. But the same three axes are being rigged. Box 3 revisions that will hit wealth harder, a nitrogen baseline that undermines entrepreneurial predictability, a political axis shifting towards more redistribution after 2024 — it is the same multiplication that Germany is going through, following two to four years behind Germany. Anyone seeing the German curve is looking in the Dutch mirror of 2028.

This is not intended to be catastrophic. It is intended to be predictable. The matrix makes no apocalyptic claims; it only calculates what happens when you multiply three axes without lightening any one of them. Anyone who considers it important that the productive population does not leave — and Het Open Vizier does — must lighten one axis somewhere. Tax burden, mobility threshold, or baseline weight; choose one and provide serious relief. If you don't, the Netherlands will appear on the H&P loss list in four years, and we will explain here why that was, mathematically speaking, no surprise.