Swiss Political System: More Than You Ever Wanted to Know
I grew up in Switzerland and left the country about 10 years ago. There&#x27;s a lot to admire about the Swiss political system. However, I feel there are also substantial flaws with it that the author fails to address. Not everything in Swiss politics is rosy.<p>One of the biggest issues, I find, is that there is no constitutional oversight e.g. in form of a court. This not only leads to things like minarets being explicitly forbidden by the constitution (!) even though at the time of that initiative there were... 3 minarets in all of Switzerland. It also leads to a lot of issues when the government has to deal with contradictory requirements. The mass immigration initiative by the SVP was a great example: implementing it literally would have meant cancelling a lot of international contracts, which nobody really wanted. In the end, I think they reached some weird compromise solution (I had long left the country by then), but nobody can argue that that&#x27;s the way the law was &quot;intended&quot; (and indeed, IIRC, the SVP tried to land another initiative that would have required the government to implement the first initiative literally... I&#x27;m not even sure what kind of legal sense that is supposed to make; thankfully, that initiative was rejected).<p>In that sense, it&#x27;s not true that the constitution is &quot;unambiguous&quot;. The government still has to draft specific laws according to new articles in the constitution and there&#x27;s still much leeway there.<p>I also disagree that Switzerland is not polarised. It&#x27;s true that the system itself, with a government involving all the major parties, acts as a stability mechanism, but the SVP has been trying to break that stability for years and years now, mounting attack after attack at the established consensus by using the kind of right-wing populism that has now become popular in other parts of the world as well. One particularly pernicious instance was when they were trying to hold the political system hostage in 2007, because the parliament didn&#x27;t re-elect one of the SVP government members (Christoph Blocher). Blocher was thought to be intolerable by many, so they elected another SVP member, Evelyn Widmer-Schlumpf, instead. However, the SVP simply proclaimed that they wouldn&#x27;t accept this and that if Schlumpf were to accept the vote, she would be expelled from her own party. It turned out that it was impossible for the SVP to just expel Schlumpf, though, so they had to expel the whole cantonal section that she belonged to, which I just find insane. Schlumpf went on to be a quite respected government member, but the SVP wouldn&#x27;t stop whining for years about how the government wasn&#x27;t representing the political parties anymore, even though they had created that situation completely on their own. In the end, Schlumpf abdicated after some years and they elected another SVP member that was slightly more tolerable.<p>Finally, we also have to look at voting participation, which is very low in Switzerland. I believe this comes partially from the fact that it&#x27;s just too exhausting to have to keep up with dozens of referenda and initiatives each year, especially when they overwhelmingly get rejected. I do think that the numbers of signatures needed to start an initiative or referendum should be increased; I think it&#x27;s currently at 100k which in this day and age means that everyone and their dog can make the people vote about something totally insane.