Das Grossmünster

The twin towers of the Grossmünster are a landmark of Zürich. An important site in the history of the Reformation, this is where Zwingli preached.

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Museum Rietberg

The simple elegance of the relatively new glass building of the Rietberg Museum in Zürich. Reflecting the Villa Wesendonck. The original owner of the estate, Otto Wesendonck was a fan and supporter of Richard Wagner and the latter spent a portion of this time in exile at a cottage here. He wrote the music to the Wesendonck Lieder during that time, as he had a special place in his heart for Mrs. Wesendonck.

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Lok 7 trundling down the hill

A view of the rear as the little train (see yesterday's post) rolls away.

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Locomotive 7 on Rigi

Ah, summertime in Switzerland! The region around the Vierwaldstättersee (lake Lucerne to many of us) is full of delights. One of them is a trip up to the top of Rigi (the queen of the mountains) on the cog railway. This year is the 50th anniversary of the Swiss Transportation Museum (link) in Lucerne. As part of the celebrations this old steam locomotive from 1873 has been pressed into service and will be plying up and down the mountain from Vitznau to Rigi-Kulm until September. More information at this site: Rigi Bahnen (in English)

Trivia: Locomotive No. 7 operated on Rigi from 1873 to 1937. Maximum speed 7 km/h. Maximum power 88.2 kW. The first locomotive built by the Winterthur locomotive factory for the first cog railroad in Europe.

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Hemisphere

On Saturday the weather was just stunning and I spent most of it in Zürich, visiting places I haven't been to before. The botanical garden of the University of Zürich, for example (link to their website). I think this is the dome with the Savannah climate.

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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.

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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).

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Truly strange juxtaposition: Giger in Gruyères

We made a little day trip on Saturday and one of the places we visited was Gruyère, home to the cheese with which you might be familiar. There's a very well-preserved medieval castle village up on a hill (810 m) in Gruyères and it is a very popular tourist destination. The counts of Gruyère occupied the place from 1050 to 1554, at which time the last count ran into financial trouble and had to abandon the family home. The castle building was constructed between 1270 and 1282 though a huge fire in 1493 destroyed most of it and it was rebuilt. The castle changed hands a couple of times before the canton of Fribourg (Gruyère is a district in Fribourg) bought the building and opened it to the public as a museum.

There are a couple of oddities about the place, but the one that I have most trouble getting my head around is the Giger Museum. H. R. Giger is a Swiss surrealist, best known for his design work on the movie Alien for which he received an Academy Award. As far as I have been able to determine, he has no connections to Gruyère (he's from Canton Graubünden, on the other side of Switzerland from Fribourg) other than the fact that he was invited to stage an exhibition of his work in 1990. He was very taken by the place and when one of the buildings was put up for sale, he bought it and made it into his museum. We didn't go in there or in the related victual establishment opposite, but I took this photo and since it fits in with the theme of old and new I've been doing, I thought I would share it.

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