Switzerland’s president is a woman, something I realized two weeks ago when I saw a picture of her at the Ukraine peace summit. Last year, it was Alain Berset, who has just been elected as the Council of Europe‘s Secretary General. The presidency rotates every year, and we have to sort through all those parties and initiatives, so it’s hard to keep track of who the president is – especially since we don’t elect them directly.
Last week, I wrote about the Swiss congress, or Parliament, or the Federal Assembly. We also have a Federal Council, which consists of seven members who are elected by Parliament every four years. Each member oversees a department (foreign affairs, finance, etc). They also choose the president and trade off who’s in that role. This year, it’s Viola Amherd, who is the 176th president of Switzerland and the ninth woman to hold the role. Here are the rest of the members.
In 1900, 1942, and 2013, the Swiss voted “no” on whether the people should directly elect Federal Council members. I can only imagine it’s because we’re overwhelmed by democracy and don’t wish to vote on even more things.
At the local level, we do directly choose our community leaders. We elected the Allschwil city council in March, and in June, we voted for mayor (Gemeindepräsident, or community president). Now, a farmer is mayor instead of a lawyer (past mayor), or a facilities manager (his opponent).
If you’re a citizen, you get to vote on even more things. Last fall, I went to a citizens-only meeting (there’s a separate council for residents). I thought I was attending a city council meeting, and being new and unemployed, I also thought this would help my integration. Had I paid more attention to the meeting’s name, I might have understood that it was, in fact, a meeting only for Allschwil citizens (Bürgergemeindeversammlung).
When we arrived, we checked in and received green pieces of paper. When it was time to vote on something, we held these up. I remember voting “yes” to the forest service buying a half-million franc tractor. I also voted to approve a budget, then once on something I’ve forgotten, and once, I abstained because I didn't know what we were voting on.
All this voting took place in public, and you held your green slip up until all the votes were counted. Then there were drinks and snacks.
If you’re in the minority in one of these votes, you have to be pretty confident, since everyone can see you. This was just a local meeting, but one canton still holds its Council of State elections publicly. In Appenzell Innerrhoden, citizens gather in the town center and vote with a show of hands. Appenzell was also the holdout on giving women the right to vote, so draw your own conclusions about it.
Back at the Allschwil meeting, before the snacks, there was another agenda item up for vote: approving new citizens. This included Swiss people officially moving their residency from one canton to Baselland, and newly-Swissed residents whose citizenship had been approved by the federal and local governments. This means they passed the various language and paperwork requirements (and paid all the fees), and now the community would decide if they got to be citizens of Allschwil. Everyone voted yes on all the new residents, but wow, the possibility for revenge on neighbors you don’t like. And no, people do not always get approved, even when the government grants their citizenship. More on that soon.
Sources:
https://www.ch-info.swiss/en/edition-2023/die-regierung/besonderheiten-des-bundesrats
Fascinating. I loved the series on Netflix, BORGEN, for its peak into Danish political processes.
Linda,
Not sure you saw the Biden-Trump debate. You can read about it everywhere.
The Democrats need to find someone else to run instead of Biden. He did look old and feeble.