Bern, Switzerland (TSR, Fre) – Switzerland now must wait until Thursday morning for Eveline Widmer Schlumpf to announce whether or not she will accept her election to the post of federal councillor. According to TSR she has asked for time until then to reflect on her decision. The government now has six of its seven councillors, but the UDC has for some time threatened to pull out its two councillors if both were not re-elected. Christoph Blocher was not and it is unclear if Samuel Schmid will refuse to take his seat, which would leave Switzerland without a government.
- 11:25, Doris Leuthard re-elected comfortably. The centre-right politician’s election completes the round of voting, but the candidates must still accept their elections before the cabinet’s composition is confirmed.
- 11:10, Hans-Rudolf Merz, a center-right Radical party member, was elected the sixth Council member.
- Ed. note, 11:05, virtually all French news web sites in Switzerland are
down at the moment due to an overload of visitors. This much is clear:
the Swiss are following the election. See also: Le Temps, results and analysis - 10:45. Christoph Blocher, UDC, has been defeated during a second round of voting, a major victory for the center and left, with Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf elected in his place. She is a UDC party member from Grisons, but as yet has not accepted the election. A motion from the UDC president to halt proceedings until later today to allow time for reflection was roundly defeated. Her election could bring to three the number of women on the seven-member council if Doris Leuthard, whose seat is the last one up for election, is also elected.
- 10:15. Four of the seven members of the Swiss government have been re-elected: Micheline Calmy-Rey, Samuel Schmid, Moritz Leuenberger and Pascal Couchepin. The other three seats are still being debated, with the Socialist party removing its candidate, Luc Recordon, but refusing to support Christoph Blocher’s re-election.
Posted by Ellen Wallace on 12 December 2007 at 14:00, last updated on 18 November 2008 at 10:34 | permalink
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 12 December 2007.
Filed under: Politics
Tags: Blocher, Politics, Swiss cabinet, Swiss parliament, UDC
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November 12th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
[...] in Switzerland. And the highly publicized split in his right-wing party, the UDC, after leader Christoph Blocher was voted out of the cabinet in December 2007 added to the pressure. Schmid, who refused to step down in [...]
November 18th, 2008 at 10:32 am
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December 10th, 2008 at 9:26 am
[...] to Blocher. Samuel Schmid and new councilor Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf were both UDC members when Blocher was ousted in December 2007. The party split, with Schmid’s Bern wing and Widmer-Schlumpf’s Graubuenden wing [...]