Switzerland: Executive sweepstakes

The Swiss parliament has elected right-wing politician Ueli Maurer of Zurich to the Federal Council, the country's seven member executive branch, following weeks of speculation about the likely continuation of the much trusted concept of "concordance" - a uniquely Swiss scheme allowing for the leading political parties to share power and be represented in the federal executive.

Maurer's election on 10 December by the slimmest of margins, with 122 votes out of 244 total, signals the return of Switzerland's numerically strongest party, the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), to the Federal Council, after an originally unforeseen hiatus of a bit less than a year.

The 'magic formula'

The SVP, which traditionally had been the party of farmers and the rural population base, but had received an aggressive and populist make-over since the early 1990s at the hands of wealthy Zurich entrepreneur Christoph Blocher had been represented in the Federal Council since 1959 with exactly one seat. This was a part of the grand coalition cooperation that was established between the four largest parties in Switzerland in the late 1950s and became more widely known under the label of "concordance."

For the rest of the 20th century, concordance was closely tied to a "magic formula" that stipulated that the four ruling parties would divide the seven seats in the Federal Council on a 2+2+2+1 basis, giving two seats to the Liberals (FDP), two seats to the Christian Democrats (CVP), two seats to the Social Democrats (SP) and one seat to the People's Party. This allocation represented proportional party strength in the polls and actually remained accurate and stable for more than four decades.

However, by the late 1990s, the scales in party strength and poll support had started to tilt, as the SVP started to make large gains at the expense of the two centrist parties, the FDP and the CVP. This was in large part due to the FDP and CVP adopting political platforms focused on international integration and European cooperation with the EU, rather than strict isolation and old-fashioned neutrality, as the SVP favored.

As the FDP and the CVP hence solidified their political values in the center and advocated a progressive approach to issues relating to economic development and immigration, they vacated a large part of the traditional and conservative political spectrum and basically left the entire right-wing to be filled by the SVP. The well-organized and well-financed SVP quickly moved in and successfully consolidated and expanded its position.

As the only credible right-wing force remaining in Switzerland, and as the only large party opposing bilateral agreements with the EU, the SVP gained in voter strength, going from 14.9 percent in 1995 to 26.6 percent in 2003, and finally peaking at 29.0 percent in 2007.

While the SVP hence did establish itself as the single strongest party, at the same time it was also repeatedly defeated or overruled in many Federal Council decisions, parliamentary votes or national polls, by the alliance of the three other governing parties. This in essence led the SVP to become somewhat of a strange hybrid, being a fully integrated ruling party, while at the same time also being the de-facto opposition.

Boosted by the circumstance of having become the strongest party by 2003, the surging SVP demanded that year a redefinition of the magic formula and a second seat in the Federal Council, at the expense of the substantially weakened CVP.

In somewhat of a spearhead attack on the federal establishment, the SVP selected its most prominent figure, the always outspoken Blocher, for the 2003 Federal Council elections, and in a nail-biter of a vote successfully pushed him through at the expense of CVP incumbent Ruth Metzler.

Overnight, the magic formula of 44 years had been shattered and the Swiss political establishment stirred up.

With Blocher's forceful and reverberating entry into the Federal Council, the SVP suddenly had more say in all executive level government decisions, yet at the same time also had the mandate and the responsibility to carry out and support all majority-vote, at-large decisions made by the Federal Council - even if Blocher or the SVP leadership did not agree with those decisions on a personal or party-doctrine level.

It was exactly with this fundamental principle of the Swiss federal government and that key element in the system of concordance and cooperation in the Federal Council to which Blocher proved to have great difficulties at adapting in his revised role as a federal magistrate and a national statesman, rather than simply a party populist from the streets or a back-bench member of parliament. 

Blocher's reign as a Federal Councilor was uneasy at best and continuously marked by a tenuous working relationship and rather poor chemistry with the other members of the executive. As a result, the other parties, led by the SP and the CVP, banded together to prevent Blocher's regularly scheduled re-election in 2007, and in quite a politically unprecedented stunt, elected with Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, a more moderate SVP candidate, to the Federal Council. She had never been on anyone's political radar before this.

After four years in office, Blocher followed the same fate of Ruth Metzler, being only the second Federal Councilor in history to be voted out of office and denied formal re-election.

The response by the enraged Blocher and the somewhat shell-shocked SVP took some time to formulate, but eventually came in a rather strong and determined way: Widmer-Schlumpf was banned from the party and excluded from the SVP's ranks in 2008.

These actions, however, proved to be rather short-sighted and in the end counter-productive to the SVP's own interests, as out of solidarity to Widmer-Schlumpf, SVP Federal Councilor Samuel Schmid left the party and joined the newly formed centrist party BDP together with her. Within the time span of only a few months, the SVP had gone from having two seats in the Federal Council to none at all, and saw itself absent from the Swiss executive for the very first time since 1929.

Unable to achieve much as an out-right opposition party only and following a string of defeats on various ballot issues and in several parliamentary votes during the course of the year, the SVP was quick to realize that the only place for it to go was back into the executive.

When Samuel Schmid hence announced in October 2008 that he would be retiring at the end of the year after eight years in office and due to health reasons, the SVP was quick to lay claim to the forthcoming vacancy.

In a move that annoyed most of the other parties, the SVP instantly and rather stubbornly proclaimed Blocher to be its renewed lead candidate for the office. Only after all the other political forces in the parliament voiced their clear-cut objections and carved it into stone that Blocher was "un-electable" did the party modify its strategy to feature a two-way ticket with a second candidate for the Federal Council elections in December.

Next to Christoph Blocher, the SVP decided to nominate Ueli Maurer, one of Blocher's most loyal lieutenants and the former, long-term president of the party.

Preserving the system

As Maurer had often been as much of an outspoken and provocative hard-liner as Blocher, his selection next to Blocher did little to satisfy those centrist and leftist forces in parliament seeking a more moderate or mild-mannered SVP exponent.

While no one from the FDP, CVP or SP challenged the SVP's legitimate claim to the seat, many were dissatisfied at the apparent lack of a true choice and uneasy about the prospect of having the equally combative Maurer suddenly in the Federal Council.

While for many members of the FDP and even some members of the CVP, Maurer was considered "electable" or simply the lesser of two evils, many in the left spectrum of parliament and with the SP considered him simply to be a "clone of Blocher." Despite these objections, all other parties acknowledged the legitimacy of the SVP to fill the seat.

"All four parties have a viable interest in concordance," Wolf Linder, professor of political science at the University of Bern, told ISN Security Watch. "Concordance may require compromises from all sides, yet it also reduces the risk that individual party agendas may fail in public votes. The price to pay for the return to an all-inclusive concordance is for the SVP the abandonment of Blocher, and for the other parties the acceptance of a different hard-line SVP candidate."

He added: "I believe that all sides are willing to pay this price in order to preserve concordance."

Or, as Georg Kreis from the Europainstitut at the University of Basel, said: "Concordance is so deeply rooted, that all parties will seek to stick with it as long as possible."

In that light, the election of Maurer, a candidate who just a few months ago would have been unfathomable to everyone, even admittedly to himself, and who had failed in previous public elections to win a seat in either the cantonal executive in Zurich, or also as senator from Zurich, was pushed through and elected to the Federal Council, for the sake of preserving the system.

Just to make things interesting, though - and to not give Maurer a free ride or a blank check to the Federal Council - the entire SP and also large segments of the CVP voted for, instead of Maurer, an unofficial SVP candidate in the form of Hansjörg Walter, a member of parliament from Thurgau and the charismatic head of the Swiss Farmers Association, one of the key SVP power bases.

In a sign of the recent unpredictability and uncertainty in the outcomes of Federal Council elections, Walter received as many as 121 votes, and only one less than the finally victorious Maurer.

Indeed, in country known for the unspectacular efficiency of its political system and the rather dull nature of its parliamentary proceedings, the elections to the Federal Council have in recent years come to behold a rare glimpse of electoral excitement, high-stakes gamesmanship, brash jockeying for position, occasional backstabbing and erratic results.

The defense test

Maurer, who may now fancy his transformation from partisan party politician to newly minted statesman, will take over the Swiss Department of Defense, following directly in the footsteps of Samuel Schmid, with whom he consistently and openly had very poor personal and professional relations.

In the function of defense minister, Maurer will be tried and tested in a similar fashion as to his compatibility with the Swiss principles of concordance and cordial collegiality with his fellow ministers in the Federal Council, when he will need to represent and advocate foreign policy and security policy issues such as Swiss cooperation with NATO peacekeeping missions, like in Kosovo, even though his party and his political base heavily oppose them.

If Maurer is to avoid Blocher's fate, he will need to emancipate himself from his long-term mentor and from his partisan history and take the high road.

Most Swiss political pundits believe he is capable of doing so and give him initial credit. In the end, the test of time will tell, though otherwise the Defense Department and the military have always been considered by all parties a core competency of the SVP, and as such Maurer, with his rank of a major, should feel right at home.