BERN. Eight people have asked the Swiss People’s Party for the seat Guy Parmelin will leave on 31 December. Seven are men. One is a woman. A finding commission will now interview them and recommend a ticket to the parliamentary group, which wants to present that ticket to the Federal Assembly on 20 November. The election itself is on 9 December.
The deadline was last Friday. The names, as registered with the party leadership, are Céline Amaudruz, the Geneva national councillor and wealth manager, who declared first; three cantonal ministers, Jean-Pierre Gallati of Aargau, Franz Ruppen of Valais and Pierre Alain Schnegg of Bern; the Valais national councillor Michael Graber and the Solothurn national councillor Rémy Wyssmann, both lawyers; the Ticino senator Marco Chiesa, an economic adviser; and Thomas Aeschi, the Zug national councillor and leader of the parliamentary group.
One woman, and a French-speaking hardliner
Amaudruz is the only woman on the list, and the only candidate who spent the early autumn telling the party to nominate her or expect trouble. Several heavier names have already declined. Pascal Schmid, long treated as a favourite of the Blocher wing, said no. Esther Friedli is out. Natalie Rickli, the Zurich health director who would have given the party a second woman in serious contention, did not come forward. The hope, still alive in parts of the group, of seating the first SVP woman in the Federal Council now rests on a single Geneva candidacy.
Schnegg is the other name insiders are circling. He sits in the Bern government, he is French-speaking, and he is a hardliner, a combination that gives him a real chance of a place on the official ticket. Vaud, Parmelin’s home canton, has argued since the resignation that the seat should stay with the francophone wing of the party. Amaudruz, Schnegg and Ruppen all speak to that demand in different ways. Aeschi does not. He is the group leader, he votes the party line, and his own cantonal section put his name in while he asked for time to think. A group leader who is also a candidate will have to manage the interviews he is, in effect, sitting above.
How a ticket becomes a federal councillor
The mechanics are the usual ones, and they are strict. The finding commission talks to the candidates and recommends. The parliamentary group, not the commission, chooses the ticket on 20 November. The United Federal Assembly then elects on 9 December. By convention the Assembly respects the party’s claim to the vacant seat and chooses from the ticket, usually of two. It does not have to. A single-name ticket is what Amaudruz has been warning against, and what Aeschi has said he does not want.
Parmelin announced on 2 October that he would leave “at 11.59pm at the very latest” on New Year’s Eve, after eleven years in government, the last of them as president and economics minister. The portfolio he leaves is the one that covers the economy, agriculture and trade. Whoever wins it inherits the capital fight with UBS, the trade files, and a party that will expect its minister to sound like the party.
Between now and 20 November the interesting question is not the length of the list. It is how short the ticket becomes, whether a woman is on it, and whether the francophone claim survives contact with the group. The Assembly votes on 9 December. The new federal councillor is sworn in for a government that, from 1 January, will no longer include the Vaud winegrower who has held the economy brief since 2019.