BERN. Another favourite has stepped aside. Pascal Schmid, the Thurgau national councillor who serves as the SVP’s asylum policy chief and was widely described as Christoph Blocher’s preferred successor to Guy Parmelin, will not stand for the Federal Council. “I have been in the National Council for three years and now want to concentrate on my Council of States candidacy,” he told the Tages-Anzeiger on Tuesday. He does not rule out a run at a later date.
Schmid framed the decision as a gut call taken with his wife after long reflection. Two practicalities weighed with it: his law firm partnership, which he intends to continue, and his bid for one of Thurgau’s Senate seats in the 2027 federal elections, a campaign that a failed Federal Council run would complicate. His withdrawal is the third heavyweight refusal in a fortnight, after Zurich government councillor Natalie Rickli and St Gallen senator Esther Friedli, with party president Marcel Dettling and Magdalena Martullo-Blocher also out.
Hours later came a fourth. Christian Imark, the Solothurn national councillor, told SRF he too would not stand, citing his family situation: his two small children, he said, need their father. Imark had been among the names the party’s right wing floated after the first refusals landed.
One name left on the table
What remains is Céline Amaudruz. The Geneva national councillor is so far the only SVP politician to have officially declared for the 9 December election, and she has done so with characteristic directness: nominate me, she has told the party leadership, or there will be trouble. Behind her, the field thins to maybes, including Glarus government councillor Jean-Pierre Gallati, who has yet to say whether he will register.
The calendar is unforgiving. Registrations close on Friday, the SVP parliamentary group settles its official ticket on 20 November, and the United Federal Assembly elects Parmelin’s successor on 9 December. Group leader Thomas Aeschi wants at least two names on the ticket, both to give the assembly a choice and to avoid the impression of a coronation. Producing that second name has suddenly become the hard part.
A seat the party cannot lose
The SVP claims the seat as of right: it is the largest party, and Parmelin is its only seat holder. No rival party disputes the claim openly, which makes the succession an internal SVP question with a public audience. The risk for the party is different: a race with one candidate invites the other parties to judge her rather than the principle, and Amaudruz, whose CHF 380,000 in annual mandate income has dominated her coverage this week, is a candidate the left would be pleased to fight.
For Blocher, who anointed Schmid quietly and lost him publicly, the fortnight has been a lesson in the limits of patronage. The SVP’s bench for 2027 looks deep; its bench for 9 December looks like one chair. Friday’s deadline will show whether anyone in the party is still willing to sit in it.