Swiss Politics for Complete Beginners - 2nd edition E-Book

Pierre Cormon

• Herausgeber: Éditions Slatkine
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 124

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

If you need to learn quickly and efficiently about Switzerland, this essay is made for you

Do you want to understand why the Swiss seem to spend their time voting on every imaginable issue?
Why the housing shortage is so acute?
Why Switzerland may be the only democratic country that has no majority and opposition?
Why shops close so early?
And you don’t want it explained in a scholarly way, as you are more interested in the spirit than in the letter?
This is your book.

A straight-to-the-point essay that will provide you with key elements to understand this small but complex country that is Switzerland

EXTRAIT

"“Who in the room knows the name of the Swiss president?”
That’s the question I asked a group of three hundred expatriates living in Geneva area at the beginning of a “Swiss Politics for Dummies” seminar in June, 2009. Around 10 to 15% of them raised their hands. About what I’d expected. And certainly not a bad score: these were people curious about Swiss politics. Enough, at least, to sacrifice an entire evening to listen to a lecture about it. With another group, things could have been much worse.
I don’t blame them. All the puzzled looks following my seemingly simple question reminded me of a ride on the Cairo underground a few years earlier. It was the final years of Hosni Mubarak era."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pierre Cormon is a journalist and writer from Geneva, as well as an active member of the expats network glocals.com. He has written three books of fiction, in French.

Leseprobe

To all my friends of the expat community, who make this place so much funnier

INTRODUCTION

“Who in the room knows the name of the Swiss president?”

That’s the question I asked a group of three hundred expatriates living in Geneva area at the beginning of a “Swiss Politics for Dummies” seminar in June, 2009. Around 10 to 15% of them raised their hands. About what I’d expected. And certainly not a bad score: these were people curious about Swiss politics. Enough, at least, to sacrifice an entire evening to listen to a lecture about it. With another group, things could have been much worse.

I don’t blame them. All the puzzled looks following my seemingly simple question reminded me of a ride on the Cairo underground a few years earlier. It was the final years of Hosni Mubarak era. The portrait of the president was everywhere. His name was on the front-page of all the newspapers. One of the two biggest underground stations was named after him (the other one was named after Sadate, his predecessor). It was January and an Egyptian friend asked me: “By the way, who’s the Swiss president?” I remained silent. I was a Swiss citizen; a journalist, writing on a regular basis about Swiss politics. I could name every member of the government1, his/her ministry, his/her political party, his/her canton of origin, and part of his/her political agenda… and yet, I wasn’t sure about the name of the president. Was it… this one? Or wait… No, this one… My friend must have thought that I was completely out of touch with reality.

That may be the case, but you will see in the chapter about coalitions that there were some attenuating circumstances surrounding my ignorance. And I’m in good company. As he was giving a press conference in Geneva in 1996, the French president, Jacques Chirac, was asked by a journalist what he thought of Flavio Cotti’s action in Bosnia. President Chirac, puzzled, asked an assistant: “Who is this Mr. Cotti?” This mysterious person was none other than the Minister of Foreign Affairs and former president of the country Mr. Chirac was visiting, and the two were supposed to meet later in the day. Another former French president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, once sent greetings to “The president of the Swiss Confederation, Mr. Nelio Cellio.” Mr. Cellio had completed his term as president more than two years earlier and had retired from politics.

Following my lecture on Swiss politics, the Q&A session began with a question from my friend Nir, about an obnoxious political poster that, at the time, was prominently displayed all over the country. It showed a white sheep kicking a black sheep to expel it from a Swiss flag. It had been made by the nationalist party UDC (SVP in German or Swiss People’s Party in the Financial Times), in support of its initiative to expel foreigners who had committed certain types of criminal offences. And that time, bingo! Everyone seemed to have heard about it. It had sparked a heated debate not only amongst the Swiss, but also amongst the expat community, about what could be tolerated in a political campaign.

That reflects a general tendency. On the rare occasions when international media reports on Swiss politics, it’s usually not about elections, or even politicians for that matter. I wouldn’t be surprised if the head of the international desk of Le Monde, El Pais or The Guardian couldn’t name more than two or three Swiss politicians. When they discuss Swiss politics, it’s usually surrounding a vote on a strange initiative: the Swiss decide to ban minarets, refuse to have six weeks of paid holidays, reinforce shareholders’ rights with a view to controlling the salaries of top managers…This reveals a significant fact: in Switzerland, the system is more important than the individuals. I suppose you could say as much about any country, but it is true to a much greater extent in Switzerland. Prominent politicians like Erdogan, Thatcher, Berlusconi and Schröder, who change their country for better or worse, don’t really exist here. In France, a past president had a reputation for waking up with a bright idea, announcing it to the press in the afternoon and making it law within two months. In Switzerland, if a politician dreamed of doing the same, the process would take several years and, at the end of it, the project would probably bear only casual resemblance to what it was at the outset. Being a Swiss politician is not a very rewarding job. Members of parliament are not overpaid by international standards and don’t enjoy a lot of perks. Ministers drive ordinary cars and walk in the street without bodyguards. Whereas the French enjoy the pomp of power, the Swiss prefer modesty.

This lack of emphasis on personalities helps give an impression of stability. No sudden changes of majority, no landslide for the opposition, not even an opposition and a majority. Imagine that: the same coalition, with exactly the same number of ministers for each of the main four parties, has ruled the country continuously from 1959 to 2003. I don’t know if it’s in the Guinness Book of World Records, but it may deserve to be. And when one party that had two seats had to give one up in favour of a party that had just one so far, it was considered a major change.

But don’t fool yourself. It doesn’t mean that nothing happens in Swiss politics. It just means that the system is regulated otherwise. That’s why the country is sometimes so hard to grasp for people from a different political culture. Things are just not where one might look for them. Deep changes can take place very quickly thanks to a popular vote, but the system is actually designed to ensure a certain level of institutional continuity and stability. That’s one of its hallmarks.

Things have not always been this way. Open one of those old fashioned history books emphasizing battles and you will see that the Swiss fought a lot against each other in past centuries. That’s not really surprising. The Swiss are a very diverse people. Some are Protestant, some are Catholic, some speak German, some French or Italian, some live in cosmopolitan cities, some in mountain villages… They fought over power, religion, territory…

But after fighting yet another civil war in the middle of the 19th century, the Swiss created a new set of political institutions and, gradually, found solutions to overcome their differences. They appropriated some features from elsewhere (the federal system was largely inspired by the US). Others were copied elsewhere (the US states that have referendums and initiative rights took them directly from the Swiss at the end of the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th2. Some of the solutions were consciously created; others emerged as a result of the balance of power. Some of them are formally embedded in laws, or in the Constitution, others are just a practice. That’s why I think that if you really want to understand what’s going on here, simply reading the Wikipedia entry about the Swiss political system won’t do. There is what’s written, and then there’s the rest. And the rest may be just as important.

So rather than giving you a course of Swiss constitutional law, in the first chapter, I will begin by highlighting seven distinctive features of Swiss politics. None of them is unique to this country, but their combination definitely is.

The seven features are:

– Federalism;

– Direct democracy;

– Multilingualism;

– A combination of proportional and majority elections;

– Coalitions;

– Part-time politicians; and

– Social partnership.

That may sound a little dry. We won’t do without a little amount of theory, but don’t worry. As we go further, we’ll see what role these features play in daily realities like shop opening hours, school programs or even buying cannabis.

Then we’ll meet the main players; see what are the advantages and shortcomings of the system and how it is evolving. Finally, we’ll discuss issues like housing, crime, immigration or healthcare.

My aim is not to give a complete description of the system – as you can easily find the hard data on the Web. I will take most of my examples from the French part of Switzerland, and notably from Geneva. Sorry for the readers living or interested in other regions. Geneva is where I live and work, and it’s the place I know best. As the old joke goes: “The Swiss get along well because they ignore each other”.

1 For American readers: please note that I use the word “government” in the British sense, meaning “the ensemble of the ministers”. That would be “the cabinet” in the United States.

2 Switzerland and the United States had a significant influence on each other, as they were the only republics in a world dominated by monarchies during most of the 19th century. On that forgotten story, I recommend The Sister Republics, by James H. Huston. It’s short, well written and gives you a very interesting view of the history of both countries.

CHAPTER 1

THE SEVEN PILLARS THE SWISS POLITICAL SYSTEM

1) Federalism

“Thou shalt rule, but not over everything”

Sometimes, a word that sounds very technical is actually emotionally loaded. “Federalism” is one of these loaded words in Switzerland. It is a highly regarded concept, one with an impact that goes further than its technical meaning, like “Republic” in France or “Constitution” in the United States. When you hear a politician mentioning it, they’re usually not discussing a technical point of constitutional law but rather defending the rights of the cantons to take care of their own business. And they have their reasons.

Switzerland is a country that was built from the bottom up. Historically, it is an alliance of sovereign microstates, which decided to create common institutions. Local identities are still very strong. Every Swiss French canton speaks French with a distinctive accent. More than a few Genevans would probably say that they feel Genevans before they feel Swiss. Don’t mistake them for Vaudois. They may not like it. And the Vaudois sometimes call their canton “le pays de Vaud,” i.e. “Vaud country.” There are differences even within a canton. Neuchâtelois from the mountains (“du haut”) have a slightly different outlook from Neuchâtelois from the lake side (“du bas”). These strong local identities would make a French-style centralized state an impossibility in Switzerland. The French imposed one in 1798, after invading the country. The results were telling: in less than five years, the country had fallen into chaos, with several coups and a nascent civil war. Napoleon had to admit the failure and let the Swiss revert to a federal system.

This history is an essential part of Swiss political culture and institutions. Today, Switzerland is made up of 26 cantons and semi-cantons (they’re almost the same thing, so let’s forget this distinction and call all of them cantons3). They form the backbone of the country. This is reflected in some lexical differences with France. When a French speaks about la République or l’Etat (the state), they are talking about the central state. When a Genevan or a Vaudois speaks about l’Etat, they refer to the cantonal administration. And in the official jargon, there’s a Republic and canton of Geneva, not a Swiss Republic.

One of the specificities of the Swiss federal system is its scale: the country as such is smaller than the biggest German states and each of the 26 cantons are, therefore, quite small. The smallest one, Appenzell Innerrhoden4, is only 173 km2, 7.5 times smaller than the city of Rome, with only 16’000 inhabitants. Only one canton has more than 1 million inhabitants: Zurich (with close to 1,4 million). To give you another point of comparison, Austria, which is twice as large as Switzerland, has only 9 states and the least populous has 285’000 inhabitants – 18 times more than Appenzell Innerrhoden. So in the case of Switzerland, we can really speak of micro-federalism.

Theoretically, at least, these 26 micro-states form the default authority of the country. Each of them has its own flag, its own constitution, its own parliament and its own laws, in addition to the federal ones. The federal authorities have no right to make a law regarding any issue not explicitly attributed to them by the constitution. If a new issue emerges, it will remain in the realm of the cantons, unless the majority of the people and of the cantons agree, in a popular vote, to delegate this issue to the federal authorities. As the Swiss are strongly attached to their cantons, they’re usually not enthusiastic about giving new powers to the federal authorities. The word “Bern” doesn’t sound better to a Swiss than the word “Brussels” to a European.

Even if the power of the cantons is slowly diminishing, it is certainly substantial by international standards. They still have an exclusive jurisdiction over certain domains. The primary school system is an example of exclusive cantonal jurisdiction. The federal authorities have no say over it. Determining in Bern how many teachers should be employed in such or such canton, what they should teach or how they should be paid would seem utterly absurd to Swiss people. They prefer to restrict control over that type of matter to those closest to the realities on the ground. As a result, primary school is quite different in Geneva from in neighbouring Vaud.

But more often, federal and cantonal jurisdictions are closely entangled. The federal state defines a framework and the cantons determine the details. That’s for example the case for the tax system. Cantons can choose very diverse solutions. A few of them have a flat rate tax for cantonal taxes (these form the bulk of direct taxes), some a very progressive one.

This diversity is increasingly difficult to maintain in certain matters. It is not very practical to have 26 different criminal procedures, or 26 different policies on money laundering or organized crime… So these domains were recently unified at the federal level. But this kind of evolution is generally considered a necessary evil rather than as a glorious march towards unity. Cantons often prefer to harmonise their policies without involving the federal authorities. They do this by making intercantonal agreements. These agreements cover fields like weapons trade, universities, taxes, hooligans, childcare… But they are always optional. The agreements that harmonise the objectives of the school system, for example, have been signed by only 15 of the 26 cantons, though disparity in the school system creates problems for people moving from one canton to another.