Blocher abgewahlt!

I know, I know. There is a labor and delivery story to tell, the counting of small fingers during the middle of the night nursing sessions, the oh! my! this is a gassy little baby complaints to make, the astounding pace of his weight gain to marvel over (born 3390 grams, three weeks later he is 4 kilos with multiple chins - perhaps that helps explain why I'm exhausted and eating 17 times a day?), the mystery of a whole new person to explore. I know, there is all that to write and I try, but I'm going to bed thirty seconds after the Small Boy these days and when I sit to think about these things, about the Boychen, it all disappears like early morning fog burning off with the sunrise. It's all in there, somewhere, in the incoherent bits and pieces in my hand-written journal. I'll get it out into something, something, eventually.

For now I can give you this: Swiss politics. Christoph Blocher, the leader* of the Swiss People's Party (SVP) - the wonderful people who brought you these flyers - has been voted out of the seven-member Bundesrat (Executive Council, or cabinet). Elected in his place with 125 votes is Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, an SVP member from the Kanton of Graubundin about whom I know nothing. Members of the Bundesrat are not elected by the general public, they are elected by members of the Swiss Parliament (there is a little primer on the Swiss Parliament in English here) - this means that the Parliament, where the SVP holds the most seats (but not a majority), voted out Blocher - probably the most well-known and certainly the most controversial politician in Switzerland - and replaced him with a different member of his party. So the SVP still holds two of the seven seats in the Bundesrat; they cannot reasonably argue that the all-important "concordance" (cooperation, congeniality) has been broken or that the SVP, as the most popular political party, has been deprived of a seat in the Bundesrat. It was a vote against Blocher and against the hard-line politics of the Zurich wing of the SVP (Samuel Schmid, the other SVP member of the Bundesrat, who is far more moderate than Blocher, was re-elected easily).

The SVP had threatened to go into opposition if Blocher wasn't re-elected to the Bundesrat; I can't see how they can realistically do that, though, seeing as how two of their members were voted into the Bundesrat. The Parliament is reflecting the will of the voters - the SVP won the most votes in the last election and they are entitled to two seats in the Bundesrat. The Parliament has given them that. They just haven't given them Blocher. So what is the SVP to do? At the moment - I'm writing this half an hour after Blocher results came in - the SVP is talking about how Frau Widmer needs to decide if she's going to accept the position (read: SVP party members behind the scene are pressuring her hard to turn down the position so that there is still a chance to elect Blocher).

Over the past few weeks cracks have appeared in the SVP internal party politics. The Zurich wing of the party seems to have gone a step too far in trying to enforce its version of the party line on party members. The hard-liners might have over-reached. The SVP, founded 100 years ago as a farmers' party - conservative, yes but hard-line xenophobic and isolationist no - the SVP is fighting for its soul.

This could get interesting.

* He is not the official party chief any more than George W. Bush is the actual party head of the Republican Party but Blocher is the leader of the SVP in the same sense you'd say Bush is the leader of the Republican party.

UPDATED TO ADD: Swiss Guy has a much more detailed post on the situation here.