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Wednesday, December 12, 2007 10:48 AM | rahel luethy | 9 comment(s)
what a good start to a new day :-)
11:28 AM | Benjamin Rosenbaum said...
Congratulations! :-)
Enjoy the bracing new post-Konkordanz era...
11:53 AM | rahel luethy said...
thanks! though i must say that it's not exactly "post-konkordanz" — svp still has two members in the federal council. if they suddenly don't recognize them as true svp members anymore and exclude them from their fraction, that's their decision...
11:57 AM | Benjamin Rosenbaum said...
Ha. That's like saying "we still have an agreement. Just because you all don't agree that we have an agreement, doesn't mean we don't agree!"
I think perhaps what you're trying to say is "it wasn't US who bailed on the konkordanz!"
In that case you're right... but the fact remains that as of this morning, Switzerland joined most democratic countries which have an opposition party and a ruling party. Things will get interesting now!
12:40 PM | rahel luethy said...
i don't quite agree. my understanding of "konkordanz" is that the composition of the federal council should represent the various parties, and especially the minorities. svp got about 30% of the public votes in october, so i'd find it natural for them to expect that this should translate to two members in the federal council. expecting a very specific candidate (blocher) to be elected, and calling it "konkordanz-verrat" if that doesn't happen, is just lame. moreover, claiming that the voting out of blocher is against the "public will" is simply blind: they forget about the fact that 70% of the public did not vote for their party!
concerning their role as the opposition party, i actually don't expect a lot of things to change. the new role doesn't give them any different tools or strategies that they didn't already have before.
i do however expect things to change for the better with the new federal council!
12:58 PM | Benjamin Rosenbaum said...
Hmm. Well, we certainly agree that it's a better Bundesrat without Blocher, and that SVP whining about Verrat and the public will is just them grasping at straws, to which I say: ha, ha, ha.
However, if I understand it correctly, the konkordanz is not a legal institution. It's a political deal between the four big parties. From 1965 until this morning, when it was time to choose a Bundesrat, the party leaderships ordered their backbenchers to vote according to a formula previously worked out by the four parties in collusion.
That is over now. The three ruling parties happened to have -- somewhat quixiotically -- softened the blow by electing two SVP representatives to the Bundesrat. But they could just as easily, if they wanted to, have elected a CVPer and a FDPer.
The governing coaltion -- the ones who decide who governs -- is now the SP, CVP, and FDP with support from the greens and defecting SVP backbenchers. The SVP itself is in opposition. That, at least, is how this result would be read in any other parliamentary democracy. You had a multi-decade "government of national unity", and it's over.
Now, it may happen that the SVP either splits, or backs down. If it backs down and re-accepts Schmidt and Widmer-Schlumpf, the four-party national unity government is restored. If there's a split, then you could have a four-party coalition of SP, CVP, FDP, and whatever the Berner SVP calls itself after the split. I guess you could call that the neue Konkordanz if you wanted to.
It sounds like what you're proposing is that the Konkordanz is not a deal between the parties, but an agreement by the (virtuous) parties with the people to allocate seats by party affiliation, proportionate to how the voters voted. But this seems to me not to hold up to close analysis. You're saying that if the SVP kick Schmidt and Widmer-Schlumpf out of their party, not merely out of their fraction, then the left-center governing coalition would have to find itself two other SVP reps to elect to the Bundesrat? Or are you saying that anyone can claim to be part of the SVP regardless of what the SVP party heirarchy says? So they could just pick two greens who would, without budging ideologically in the least, now declare that they are SVPers, and Konkordanz would be served?
Just so you understand where I'm coming from -- I hate the SVP and I think these are their just desserts for the disgusting campaign they ran. I relish the idea that the gloves have now finally come off. But I am also amused at the pretense that everyone is still one big happy family...
1:32 PM | rahel luethy said...
i just think that the svp is a really bad loser. let's assume that, the day before yesterday, the parliament had actually offered them three seats in the federal council, schmid, blocher, and a third new member. chances are quite high that the svp would have suggested widmer-schlumpf.
as another fact, cvp, sp, and the greens slowly started to realize that they actually did have the power to kick blocher out and get someone else in. however, they didn't elect a cvp member (which would have re-established the prae-metzler formula), but imho sticked as close to the general understanding of konkordanz as possible, namely by re-electing schmid and electing widmer-schlumpf, another svp member.
and now the svp suddenly interprets the validity of an elected member differently, just because blocher is out -- that really seems to be beyond asking for konkordanz!
1:42 PM | Benjamin Rosenbaum said...
Right. The SVP is a really bad loser. The governing coalition said "you can have Konkordanz, but without Blocher." The SVP responded: "Well then screw the Konkordanz!"
So now there's no Konkordanz.
That's what I've been saying all along.
The CVP, SP, and FDP can make an extremely generous offer for a continued deal between the parties. But if SVP nonetheless picks up its toys and goes home... then there's no deal between the parties.
I also don't think it's true that the SVP has no new tools or strategies, though I'm less sure of that, not being that learned a student of Swiss politics in particular. In most countries, going into opposition does tend to give you more options: you can trash everything the government does and brag about how much better things would be if you were in charge, and since you do nothing but criticize, the government cannot really retaliate.
This is why people were eager to, for instance, get Hamas into the Palestinian Authority government, where they would actually have to take responsibility for administration and negotiations.
People judge a governing party on its performance; they judge an opposition party on its platform. This can give an opposition party an advantage at general election time.
It can also work the other way, of course, and in this case, where the SVP walked away from governance despite what you rightly characterize as a generous offer of coalition, it may hurt them. It certainly strengthens the notion of an unhealthy "cult of personality" around Blocher.
Given how much the Swiss tend to resent people who "bluffe" and take up too much space, if I were the governing parties I would make as much political gain as I could out of Blocher's inflated ego.... :-)
1:56 PM | rahel luethy said...
o.k., think i got your point now. you're saying that whether you'd still call it konkordanz is a consequence of how the svp interprets the composition of the federal council, and not just simple calculus of what parties are represented by the elected members. that's what you meant with
"It sounds like what you're proposing is that the Konkordanz is not a deal between the parties, but an agreement by the (virtuous) parties with the people to allocate seats by party affiliation"
right? in that sense, yes, i agree that we are in a post-konkordanz era now ;-)
2:04 PM | Benjamin Rosenbaum said...
Yeah. I'm just looking at this in the light of the way most parliamentary democracies function. In that light, it's a pretty historic moment in Swiss politics, because you now essentially have a center-left governing coalition. So far the center-left coalition is playing nice by including liberal SVP members, but I don't expect that to last forever if the SVP takes the opposition route.
Let's say the SVP doesn't split, and ignores Schmidt and Widmer-Schlumpf for two years and spends their time becoming more radical, trashing everything the Bundesrat does, and proposing platforms that the government despises. Then Schmidt decides to quit, emigrate to Australia and take up serious birdwatching, so they have to pick a new Bundesrat. Do the governing parties still feel the obligation to pick a replacement from the SVP, at that point?
You can probably judge better than I can, but I'd think that at that point they would be crazy to do so.
(However, it was very smart of them to stick to Schmidt and Widmer-Schlumpf this time, because there's a good chance they'll succeed in splitting the SVP, which I think would be great.)
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Benjamin Rosenbaum said...