Excursion: Swissminiatur at Melide on Lago Lugano

Swiss politics 101


The parliament building in Bern has been under renovation since I moved here, so the photos I have of it involve a lot of scaffolding. This is a photo of a model at Swissminiatur, an amusement park in Canton Ticino with 1:25 scale models of some of the most sightworthy things in Switzerland (and at least one why-is-that-here). Yes, trains as well and some dated luxury sports cars.

The reason I bring this up is that another controversial parliamentary election campaign season is upon us. Over the course of the next few days, I'll try to briefly summarize what makes it controversial, in a style appropriate for my own short attention span. This exercise is partly (maybe even mostly) for my own benefit and I'm having to inform myself about this topic. If it bores you, come back in a couple of days, I expect to be done by then.

Some basic information about the structure of the government:

• 7 members of der Bundesrat = Federal Council (elected by the members of the Parliament)
• 1 Bundesrat member is elected President each year (rotating position)
• 200 members of the National Council in the Parliament (Nationalrat)
• about 36,000 people are represented by each MP
• 46 senators: members of the Council of States (Ständerat) in the Parliament
  

The political groups and their popularity:

• 4 main political groups
• 25 percent of voters support SVP - Swiss People's Party - right/far-right
• 21 percent of voters support SP - Social Democratic Party - left
• 16 percent of voters support FDP - Free Democratic Party - center-right (liberal)
• 16 percent of voters support CVP - Christian Democratic People's Party - center
• 11 percent of voters support the Greens - green/left
• 11 percent of voters support the rest

Notice the big chunk carried by the rightwing party. It wasn't like that until 1999. Tomorrow: the Magic Formula and the increasing popularity of the right. Link to the website of the Swiss Parliament (options for Deutsch, Français, Italiano and to some extent, English).

20061103 Canon PowerShot S410

'Tis the season IV

I'm not going to say much, but I'm quietly cheering. For those of you who might be interested, here's a list of my previous posts on politics. Oh, and here's a link to a post about this subject by blogger Margaret Powell, with a great spoof of the black sheep poster some of you might recall.

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