The Neue Zürcher Zeitung opens today's business page with a headline that is both dry and devastating: “The battle for the wealthy is intensifying.” Never before have so many millionaires emigrated — Germany above all — and Switzerland is profiting. The figure that carries the article comes from the annual report of the London-based advisory firm Henley & Partners: 165,000 millionaires will relocate their primary residence in 2025, a record that exceeds the previous peak (142,000 in 2024) by fourteen per cent. 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 two years.

That is how one reads the news. But Het Open Vizier has been reading news of this kind differently for two weeks now. Since the introduction of Vote Impact — the matrix file that produces projections by multiplying three axes — we have a lens that turns the NZZ story into a case. What NZZ describes is neither random nor uniquely German. It is an outcome of the matrix the moment three inputs reinforce each other.

What is actually happening

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

Destination list 2026, per Henley & Partners: Singapore, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Hong Kong, New Zealand — and in Southern Europe emphatically Malta, Portugal, Cyprus. Losers' list: United Kingdom, Germany, France, Norway, South Korea. The rankings have flipped in two years.

The three axes

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

The party axis in Germany has become destabilising since the last coalition negotiations. Not because one party is radical, but because the combination is becoming radical. The debate over a wealth tax, combined with the escalated Wegzugsbesteuerung, lifts the 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 person axis defies averaging. Someone with wealth is by definition an unweighted point in the population. A pensioner with stock-market holdings 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 person axis determines whether the push factor can convert into behaviour at all. Hence the statistical German worker stays — he cannot leave — and the statistical entrepreneur goes.

The baseline axis is the least discussed and the most decisive. Germany's baseline is no longer what it was: export dependency on a weakening Chinese market, energy prices that after the Russian invasion sit structurally higher, a demographic trajectory in which the Leistungsträger cohorts retire and state expenditure per capita rises. If that baseline weighs thirty per cent more heavily on a wealthy person's account than a decade ago, then any party axis that scores even slightly higher on “redistribution” is the tipping point.

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

Why Switzerland (still) profits

NZZ turns Switzerland's win into a positive story, but in the matrix it is a derivative. Switzerland has not suddenly become more attractive; the surrounding countries have become less so. As long as Switzerland's fiscal predictability scores higher than that of Germany, France or the UK, inflow follows. NZZ itself names the first counterforce: a rising Wegzugsbesteuerung on Swiss soil, the Steuerinitiative that speculated on a 50% rate on inheritances above fifty million. Switzerland's baseline is beginning to harden too. In the matrix, that is a lag-warning of about three quarters.

Italy does it more spectacularly under the radar. Raising the flat tax from €200,000 to €300,000 has not slowed the inflow of wealthy residents; it has accelerated it. Reason: the certainty of the amount weighs more heavily than the amount itself. Predictability beats progressivity — that is a matrix insight every tax lawyer grasps instantly and every politician very slowly.

What this says about the Netherlands and Malta

The Netherlands does not appear 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 heavy enough yet, the party axis not high enough. But the same three axes are being erected. Box-3 revisions that will hit wealth harder, a nitrogen baseline that undermines entrepreneurial predictability, a political axis shifting after 2024 toward more redistribution — it is the same multiplication Germany is going through, two to four years behind. Whoever sees the German curve is looking into the Dutch mirror of 2028.

Malta sits on the winning side of the same matrix — for now. Low, predictable taxation on foreign income, English-language administration, EU passport, no wealth tax. Together those three inputs deliver a low aggregate score on the “push” axis and a high one on the “pull” axis. As long as Malta does not raise its own baseline (property prices, infrastructure pressure, political noise), the inflow continues. The matrix does not judge that; it simply calculates it.

This is not meant catastrophically. It is meant predictably. The matrix makes no apocalyptic claims; it merely calculates what happens when three axes multiply without any of them being relieved. Anyone who cares about the productive not leaving — and Het Open Vizier does — must relieve one axis somewhere. Tax burden, mobility threshold, or baseline hardening; choose one and unload it seriously. Fail to, and the Netherlands appears on the H&P losers' list in four years, and we will explain here why that was, mathematically, not a surprise.