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Christophe Blocher has been given the boot, pushed out of the Federal Council. If you’ve followed Swiss politics at all you’ll know this is a serious victory for the centre and left of Switzerland, which have worried their way through recent weeks after Blocher’s right-wing UDC party won 33% of the vote for seats in Parliament in October.

But if you’ve only read foreign headlines, you’ll think Blocher’s departure makes Switzerland look a little saner, for pre-election stories from outside the country gave a simplistic picture that ran something like this: Blocher’s party, a group of racists, have a huge public following, therefore Switzerland is beginning to look like a neo-nazi state.

Excuse me?

Today’s election, for those who were lucky enough to be free to watch it on television, was an extraordinary lesson in negotiation and diplomacy that the outside world would do well to reflect on. It was a showcase for what the Swiss do best – set aside chocolates, watches and banks for a minute. It is very easy to forget that the country has four official languages, and this does not include English. It has cultures, religions and groups of people that vary enormously from high Alpine village farmers to Bahnhofstrassse international funds managers. A Green in Geneva such as Robert Cramer has little in common with the far right edges of the UDC in Schwyz. And yet, they are able to focus on balance: how to put together a government where everyone has a say.

The process is slow, but it is also wonderfully efficient in the end, a matter of plotting and plodding and machinations and talking to people whose views are different from your own until you find the thin but silvery thread of agreement. With enough patience, you do find it.

Politics excite some, bore others but clearly, if you want to understand anything about the place you live in you should try to follow its political life. Foreigners who agree with the theory are often defeated by the reality: Swiss politics are not easy  to understand because they are complex.

This is precisely why we should care about Swiss politics. Switzerland, for all its faults and its many divisions, runs pretty well. The word democracy has been banalized around the world to imply that people simply get to vote in a democratic society.

The real art of democracy is far more complex, a tapestry of diplomacy.

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