All you need to know about Switzerland: government

July 10, 2010, 10 Comments

Annual photo of the Bundesrat with the Federal Chancellor

The Swiss TV news last night spent 15 minutes reporting and analysing the resignation of Moritz Leuenberger, the transport minister. True, he has been in the government for 15 years, and transport is very important to the Swiss, but even so it seemed a bit too in-depth. After all, in Britain transport ministers come and go as regularly as trains to Edinburgh – there have been 13 British ones in the time that Mr Leuenberger served. So why all the fuss? It’s all because Switzerland is governed by committee. Thanks to proportional representation and multiple parties, almost every ruling council at every level is a coalition of some sort – and the national government is no exception.  

The government itself is known as the Bundesrat, or Federal Council. It consists of seven members and is a permanent coalition, with no one party or person ever in control. Each Federal Councillor is in charge of a department of state, such as Finance or Foreign Affairs or, in Mr Leuenberger’s case, Transport, Environment, Energy, and Communications. Quite a mouthful and quite a collection of roles. My personal favourite is the ministry of Defence, Civil Protection and Sports; Switzerland is possibly the only country to have a Defence Minister responsible for PE. The Councillors take it in turns to be president for a year, while still running their own department. Not that the president has any more power, but someone has to shake hands with visiting leaders and make a speech on 1 August. At the moment the president is Doris Leuthard, the economic affairs minister, but only until 31 December. Moritz Leuenberger had been due to be Mr President for a third time next year. Perhaps he’d just had enough handshaking?  

The Bundesrat is elected every four years by parliament, not by a popular vote – the one time in Swiss politics when the people do not have a direct say. This is supposed to prevent all that squabbling that afflicts other countries, usually called a presidential campaign, as well as preventing party, linguistic, or regional loyalties affecting the result. It also made things exceedingly boring and predictable, at least until recently. Before 2003, a ‘magic formula’ was used so that the Bundesrat as a whole represented the four main political parties and the different regions. And since Federal Councillors generally stay, and are re-elected, for years until they retire, resign or die, parliament was often little more than a rubber stamp. 

Since 2003 things have been rather chaotic, at least in Swiss terms, and all because the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (known as SVP, or Schweizerische Volkspartei, in German) has been playing politics. It ousted a sitting Councillor, then lost one of its own seats, stormed out of the government, then came back meekly a year later. As a result, there are now five parties represented in the Bundesrat, making it look like alphabet soup: SVP, SP, CVP, FDP, BDP. The big question is, who will replace the resigning Councillor? Mr Leuenberger is from the SP, or Social Democratic Party, but will his party retain its seat? We won’t know until parliament reconvenes after the summer break, and a summer is a long time in politics, even in Switzerland. 

Until then, here are a few Bundesrat facts:  

• There have been 114 Councillors since the system was introduced in 1848
• Canton Zurich has had 20 Councillors, Canton Vaud 14 and Canton Bern 12
• The cantons of Jura, Nidwalden, Schaffhausen, Schwyz and Uri have never been represented
• The first woman to be elected was Elisabeth Kopp (1984); there are currently three women
• Ticino has had 7 Councillors, but an Italian speaker has not been elected since 1999
• Nineteen have died in office, one of them a suicide, none an assassination
• The longest serving Councillor is Karl Schenk from Bern; he was there for 31 years, 7 months & 6 days (and president six times), until dying in office in 1895 aged 74