Section: Policy
What the new National Council reveals
The run-up to the federal elections did not offer much in the way of substantive debate. Ecology was omnipresent, overshadowing issues such as Europe, old-age provision and health insurance. In contrast to the upstream campaign, the results are very interesting: the left does not represent the workers it wants to defend, and the divide between town and country has been consummated.
With the green wave, a new conservatism?
Liberalism and conservatism, two niches of the classical European right, are not the big losers of the federal elections. If you think about it, the ecological preoccupation now officially present among the population denotes a new form of conservatism and way of conceiving freedom, beyond the social and progressive dimension that characterizes this movement. A mutation of the great ideologies that brings great strengths, but also great risks. Analysis.
Mathieu Fabian Gauss, an ex-Green who became PBD
He is one of the few federal election candidates to have switched parties. How does one move from the ecologist Green Party to the bourgeois-democratic Party? Discussion.
L’UDC à nouveau censurée?
At the very end of last week, the YouTube company deleted a video by the Zurich SVP denouncing immigration to Switzerland and its consequences for security and welfare. On learning of the company's decision, the party immediately denounced it as censorship.
Has Eric Zemmour crossed the red line?
At the «Right-Wing Convention» on Saturday, September 28, French polemicist Eric Zemmour delivered a speech that many considered racist and Islamophobic. Did he cross the line? A point-by-point analysis, without any cheap moralizing.
After the SVP, chaos
Let's try a little imagination. It's Sunday, October 20, 2019. Since midday, the results for the first cantons have been trickling in, with some regions clearly going faster than others. Suddenly, to everyone's surprise and contrary to what the media and experts had been claiming for several months, it's not the ecologist parties that are posting surprising scores; it's the Union démocratique du center! As the day progresses, the map of Switzerland changes to an almost uniform green, but not a light green. This one is much darker. At around 7.30pm, when Swiss Radio's star presenter takes to the airwaves, the news is crystal clear: for the first time since 1919 and the end of radical rule in Switzerland, one party has won an absolute majority in both the National Council and the Council of States, and that party is the SVP.
The «climate generation»?
Les lundis de l'actualité - Clément Guntern The political news of recent months speaks for itself. The recent strikes over the...
The false narratives of progressivism and nationalism
Enthusiasm: will you be nothing more than a wave of stupid emotions? Will you no longer kindle the fire of intelligence to spur us on to the discovery of our destiny? Modernity is over, and with it the great visions of the world it proposed. So what's left?
The president who wants to be as big as the ox
President of the Confederation Ueli Maurer will soon forget his latest media outbursts, particularly in the USA. A few weeks earlier, he was the target of criticism for his involvement in China's New Silk Roads project. Analysis.
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