( march 2o12 )
The End : Last summer in 2011, before parliamentary and subsequent federal elections, the four women in the Federal Council decided to slap the cheap establishment of the country for arrogant behavior and started the end of the ere of nuclear power production. Just like that, out of the blue. The public cheered, they all got re-elected in December ( one resigned, but her party kept the seat ).
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The beginning : Four years before in 2007, the members of the SVP (the right-wing party that fears minarets) excluded one of their two federal councilors from the party. The cause for this political suicide happened shortly before, during the councilor elections : the "excluded" councilor, she had in fact not been elected into the executive by her own party but by the center-left parties. An unusual move from them with the goal of throwing the SVP's divisive leader out of government. The plan (if there was a plan) had worked and even better than expected : the unelected councilor felt attacked unjustly. A feeling that was as well astonishing, considering he had ousted by himself a councilor just four years before that, as well as it was not so astonishing, considering he appeared to have actually cleaned up some government spending during his term. Most certainly he wouldn't be a successful politician if he wouldn't have ignored half of the reality, and so he proposed that either the surprise-councilor not accept the top-job or be excluded from the party. In vain, she accepted the election.
The resulting mess split the SVP and the spin-off BDP (Conservative Democrats) welcomed the contested councilor with open arms, propulsing the small party at once to the executive. So in the beginning, the SVP counted roughly thirty percent of the voter share, the BDP united four percent, and both were sitting each on one of the seven federal chairs. For the former it was one chair, for the latter it was a walk on a thin edge. The perfect political entanglement to which a lot of ink followed in the national press on how such a small party could be represented in the highest public office, and whether the elections had been done "properly".
The storm : A longer parallel development in society comes since roughly the end of the 90'. A part of the population started worrying because the left wasn't able to propose an affordable welfare state, and also because the green movement was still trying to tackle environmental issues by adapting modernity to premedieval standards. Another part of the population grew cynical because the center-right still favored banks and multinationals over the small enterprises that create jobs at home. The right was just grotesque. Gladly the Green Liberal party emerged and blocked later together with the Conservative Democrats any attempt from the old established parties to grow.
The bolt : For fifty years the composition of the Swiss Federal Council hadn't changed. The four biggest parties had been included in the executive. The 2003 elections saw already a tense and revolting power trading, and then that day in 2007, when the SVP excluded their councilor subsequent to the federal elections in a very nobody-like way (as narrated above), just then indeed, the ruling parties lost a seventh of the Swiss executive power. Something they were able to grasp only four years later.
The thunder : The big old parties expected the new-comer movements to steam out and perceived the lost seat only as a short term imbalance. Surprisingly to them, the GLP and BDP had increased the voter share between '07 and '11 again, and won each roughly eight percent in the parliamentary elections. It was one of those beautiful moments were established politicians don't understand the world anymore. It felt like the conservative center-right had just lost the majority. The first time in 150 years! And past achievements oblige, that new minority claimed anyway a majority in the Federal Council... Of course the actual new majority saw it differently. Two months were left before the elections of the Swiss presidential seven. The entanglement continued.
The center-left parties seemed conscious of the rough power trading they had played in '07, when they kicked the opposition leader out of government, and were so conditionally open to re-allocate again a second federal chair to the SVP, which after all was still the biggest party of the country with the roughly thirty percent of the electorates' support. Incredible as it sounds though, the latter failed again to propose a councilor with whom the parliamentary majority could imagine tackle the challenges ahead. The SVP stubbornly lost in the federal councilor elections to win that second chair back. The contested BDP councilor got confirmed and re-elected. I guess also thanks to her brilliant first term. It confirmed the end of the rule of the four established parties and with it of the "magic formula". Switzerland has now a green, federal, liberal and social head-of-state : a government for the 21st century.*
The moral : A condition for a smooth ideological shift to happen in an executive, in order to reflect a new social, religious or economic environment, is for the ignoring or arrogant (detached) establishment not to be able to fight that shift. Something impossible in a mono-polar executive, unless the people go to the streets and choke the economy. It's that constant political balancing act that brings the stability of the alpine nation. And so when in 2011 the world had been running again over the cliff of financial collapse, the Swiss Federal Council was able to read the new environment and react on it. It had been composed with four women that knew how to throw the "Golden Lasso".
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*ja ja, at least in my delusion
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