As the majority of Swiss glaciers are currently receding through global warming, the glacier forefields have become an interesting study site for primary microbial succession and the main drivers of this colonization. We characterized the structure and composition of bacterial, archaeal and fungal communities along the Damma glacier forefield in central Switzerland. Bacteria were the most diverse as shown by the highest Shannon diversity index. The major bacterial lineages found are proteobacteria, actinobacteria, acidobacteria and cyanobacteria. The most striking finding was that euryarchaeota were predominantly colonizing young soils and crenarchaeota mainly mature soils. Fungi shift from an ascomycetes dominated community in young soils to the more plant symbiotic basidiomycetes community in old soils. Redundancy analysis indicated that base saturation, pH, soil C and N and plant coverage were the most important drivers for the microbial succession along the forefield.