Excursion: Bundeshaus in Bern

Bern is the capital of Switzerland, and lies upstream of Villigen on the river Aare. Quite far upstream. Here's one of my photos of the Bundeshaus (Parliament) I mentioned yesterday as having a lot of scaffolding, and in this case, cranes. I stood here to take this photo, the Bundeshaus is to the left. There's a lot to say about Bern, but I'll just send you to an active Bern blog by, surprise, yet another foreigner in CH! To be fair, since I look for blogs written in English, I'm trawling through a sample that must be heavily non-native-Swiss.

Back to the business at hand:

• 1959 was the year in which the 4 main political parties agreed to divide the Cabinet seats according to the public support for each party. This allocation is known as the Zauberformel = Magic Formula.
• 2 seats for the SP Social Democratic Party - left [had 26.3% of the votes then]
• 2 the number of seats held by FDP Free Democratic Party - center-right (radical) [23.7%]
• 2 the number of seats held by CVP Christian Democratic People's Party - center [23.3%]
• 1 the number of seats held by SVP Swiss People's Party - far right [had 11.6%]

Source: Der Bund kurz erklärt 2006

Sometime in the early 1990s, the far right SVP started to see a strong rise in voter support. See graphic from the Federal Statistics Office here. The distribution of seats in the Cabinet remained in place until the 1999 parliamentary elections when the far right SVP received 22.48% of the 2,005,449 valid votes cast. Note: the number of registered voters that year was 4,620,850 which means that 43% of the voters turned out. In 2003, 45% of the voting population cast their ballots. While keeping in mind that the Swiss have a multitude of elections or referenda thoughout the year so maybe there's some voter burn-out, it's interesting to compare that with the following countries at their last parliamentary or presidential elections:

• 85% in the first round of the 2007 presidential elections in France
• 83% in parliamentary elections 2006 in Italy
• 77% in the 2005 parliamentary elections in Germany
• 57% in the 2004 presidential elections in the US
  

Source: Silent majority always wins Swiss ballots at swissinfo.org.

In the minds of some, 2003 was the year the Magic Formula died as the continued popularity of the SVP among the voters called for a reorganization in the Cabinet:

• 23.3% of the votes for SP - 2 seats (no change)
• 17.9% of the votes for FDP - 2 (no change)
  
• 14.4% for the CVP - 1 (was 2)
  
• 26.6% for SVP - 2 seats (was 1)
  

Source: IFES Election Guide

The popularity of the SVP has caused much hand-wringing among the other parties, who have been unable to attract their voters back. Here's a swissinfo article about the shuffle after the 2003 elections. Tension between the SVP and the other groups is high and SVP is currently claiming that there's a conspiracy to drive them out of Parliament. The leader of the group, Christoph Blocher, is currently under investigation (swissinfo). More on that later.

20070715