Who runs Switzerland? Not the lobbies, the people

Accused since Rousseau of sullying the mechanisms of a true democracy, pressure groups are nonetheless an essential cog in the wheel. Seated among the «intermediate bodies» dear to Tocqueville, they enable opinions to be forged.

In 1983, the Zurich-based publisher Orell Füssli released a book that caused a sensation in Switzerland’s small political circles. Its publication in French the following year by Editions 24 Heures amplified its impact, elevating it to the status of a dismayed account of what our venerable semi-direct democracy had become: a den of influential men who remotely controlled elected officials and, through them, relentlessly manipulated the good people called to the polls to ratify the decisions they had made in the corridors of government. Thus began the reign of collusion, which they had allegedly forged with the Federal Council’s inner circle. Its t