Federal Council (Switzerland)
The Federal Council is the federal cabinet of the Swiss Confederation. Its seven members also serve as the collective head of state and government of Switzerland. Since World War II, the Federal Council is by convention a permanent grand coalition government composed of representatives of the country's major parties and language regions.
While the entire Federal Council is responsible for leading the federal administration of Switzerland, each Councillor heads one of the seven federal executive departments. The president of the Swiss Confederation chairs the council, but exercises no particular authority; rather, the position is one of a first among equals and rotates among the seven Councillors annually.
The Federal Council is elected as a body by the 246 members of the Federal Assembly of Switzerland for a term of four years after each federal parliamentary election, without the possibility of recall or a vote of no confidence. Incumbents are not term-limited and are by convention almost always re-elected; most serve around 8 to 12 years in office.
The chancellor of Switzerland serves as the general chief of staff of the Federal Council, and not as an eighth member.
Members
the members of the Federal Council are, in order of seniority:Origins and history
Origins of the institution
The Federal Council was instituted by the 1848 Federal Constitution as the "supreme executive and directorial authority of the Confederation".When the Constitution was written, constitutional democracy was still in its infancy, and the founding fathers of Switzerland had little in the way of examples. While they drew heavily on the United States Constitution for the organisation of the federal state as a whole, they opted for the collegial rather than the presidential system for the executive branch of government. This accommodated the long tradition of the rule of collective bodies in Switzerland. Under the Ancien Régime, the cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy had been governed by councils of pre-eminent citizens since time immemorial, and the later Helvetic Republic as well as the cantons that had given themselves liberal constitutions since the 1830s had also had good experiences with that mode of governance.
Today, only three other states, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Andorra and San Marino, have collective rather than unitary heads of state. However the collegial system of government has found widespread adoption in modern democracies in the form of cabinet government with collective responsibility.
Changes in composition
The 1848 constitutional provision providing for the Federal Counciland indeed the institution of the Council itselfhas remained unchanged to this day, even though Swiss society has changed profoundly since.Party representation
Free Democratic hegemony, 1848–1891
The 1848 Constitution was one of the few successes of the Europe-wide democratic revolutions of 1848. In Switzerland, the democratic movement was ledand the new federal state decisively shapedby the Radicals. After winning the Sonderbund War against the Catholic cantons, the Radicals at first used their majority in the Federal Assembly to fill all the seats on the Federal Council. This made their former war opponents, the Catholic-Conservatives, the opposition party. Only after Emil Welti's resignation in 1891 after a failed referendum on railway nationalisation did the Radicals decide to co-opt the Conservatives by supporting the election of Josef Zemp.Emerging coalition government, 1891–1959
The process of involving all major political movements of Switzerland into the responsibility of government continued during the first half of the 20th century. It was hastened by the FDP's and CVP's gradually diminishing voter shares, complemented by the rise of new parties of lesser power at the ends of the political spectrum. These were the Social Democratic Party on the Left and the Party of Farmers, Traders and Independents on the Right. In due course, the CVP received its second seat in 1919 with Jean-Marie Musy, while the BGB joined the council in 1929 with Rudolf Minger. In 1943, during World War II, the Social Democrats were also temporarily included with Ernst Nobs.Grand coalition, 1959–2003
The 1959 elections, following the resignation of four councillors, finally established the Zauberformel, the "magical formula" that determined the council's composition during the rest of the 20th century and established the long-standing nature of the council as a permanent, voluntary grand coalition. In approximate relation to the parties' respective strength in the Federal Assembly, the seats were distributed as follows:- Free Democratic Party : 2 members,
- Christian Democratic People's Party : 2 members,
- Social Democratic Party : 2 members,
- Swiss People's Party : 1 member.
End of the grand coalition, 2008
The governmental balance was changed after the 2003 elections, when the SVP/UDC was granted a council seat for their leader Christoph Blocher that had formerly belonged to the CVP/PDC's Ruth Metzler. Due to controversies surrounding his conduct in office, a narrow Assembly majority did not reelect Blocher in 2007 and chose instead Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, a more moderate SVP/UDC politician, against party policy. This led to a split of the SVP/UDC in 2008. After liberal regional SVP/UDC groups including Federal Councillors Widmer-Schlumpf and Samuel Schmid founded a new Conservative Democratic Party, the SVP/UDC was left in opposition for the first time since 1929, but returned into the council with the election of Ueli Maurer on 10 December 2008, who regained the seat previously held by Schmid, who had resigned. The SVP/UDC regained its second seat on the Council in 2015, when Widmer-Schlumpf decided to resign after the SVP/UDC's large election gains in the 2015 election, being replaced by Guy Parmelin.Women on the council
Women gained suffrage on the federal level in 1971. They remained unrepresented in the Federal Council for three further legislatures, until the 1984 election of Elisabeth Kopp. In 1983, the failed election of the first official female candidate, Lilian Uchtenhagen and again in 1993 the failed election of Christiane Brunner, was controversial and the Social Democrats each time considered withdrawing from the Council altogether.There were two female councillors serving simultaneously for the first time in 1999, and three out of seven councillors were women from 2007 till 2010, when Simonetta Sommaruga was elected as the fourth woman in government in place of Moritz Leuenberger, putting men in minority for the first time in history. Also remarkable is the fact that the eighth non-voting member of government, the chancellor, who sets the government agenda, was also a woman.
In total, there have been ten female councillors in the period 1989 to present:
- The first woman councillor was Elisabeth Kopp, elected 1984, resigned in 1989.
- Ruth Dreifuss, served from 1993 to 2002, was the first woman to become President of the Confederation in 1999. Since her election there has always been at least one woman on the council.
- Ruth Metzler , served from 1999 to 2003 and was not re-elected to a second term. Upon her election two women served on the council simultaneously for the first time.
- Micheline Calmy-Rey was elected in 2003 and served until 2011.
- Doris Leuthard was elected in 2006 and served until 2018.
- Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf was elected in December 2007 and served until December 2015.
- Simonetta Sommaruga was elected in September 2010. Together with Micheline Calmy-Rey, Doris Leuthard and Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, women were in the majority in the Federal Council for the first time, until January 2012, when Alain Berset replaced Micheline Calmy-Rey.
- Karin Keller-Sutter and Viola Amherd were elected on 5 December 2018. Keller-Sutter is currently on the council, while Amherd served until 2025.
- Élisabeth Baume-Schneider was elected on 7 December 2022 and is the most recent woman to be elected to the council.
Regional balancing acts
Since the rule against Federal Councillors being from the same canton was abolished, there have been a few examples of it happening. The first time was from 2003 to 2007, when both Moritz Leuenberger and Christoph Blocher from the canton of Zurich were in office. It happened again between 2010 and 2018, starting when Simonetta Sommaruga and Johann Schneider-Ammann from the canton of Bern were elected in 2010. As of 2023, four cantons - Nidwalden, Schaffhausen, Schwyz, and Uri - have never been represented on the Federal Council. The canton of Jura is the most recent canton to be represented; since 1 January 2023, it has been represented by Elisabeth Baume-Schneider.
Whenever a member resigns, they are generally replaced by someone who is not only from the same party, but also the same language group. In 2006, however, Joseph Deiss, a French-speaker, resigned and was succeeded by Doris Leuthard, a German-speaker. In 2016, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, a German-speaker, was succeeded by Guy Parmelin, a French-speaker. Most recently, in 2023, German-speaking Simmonetta Sommaruga was replaced by French-speaking Elisabeth Baume-Schneider. Historically, at least two council seats have been held by French- or Italian-speakers. The language makeup of the council as of 2022 is four German-speakers, two French-speakers and one Italian-speaker. In November 2017, Ignazio Cassis became the first Italian speaker to serve on the council since 1999. For elections to the Federal Council, candidates are usually helped by a high degree of fluency in German, French, and Italian.
With the council's 2023 iteration, the constitutional requirement that languages and regions be appropriately balanced is under increased strain. "Latin speakers" – people who either speak French, Italian, or Romansh – now form a majority on the council, despite more than sixty percent of the Swiss citizens speaking German as a first language. Likewise, no current Federal Councillors grew up in an urban area.