LETTER FROM GENEVA
The values of the land – family, homeland and tradition – will be well defended in the new Swiss parliament, which returned on Monday, December 4, after the federal parliamentary elections of October 22, marked by the rise of rural communities, a powerful reactor of Swiss conservatism.
Although they represent only 2.3% of the working population and 1% of GDP, farmers have 40 seats (+6) out of 246 in both houses of the Federal Assembly. No other profession is better represented in Bern's Federal Palace: One in six members of parliament is a farmer in this Alpine nation where their status continues to be mythologized, both in the collective psyche and in the communication clichés of Swiss tourism, which are not averse to dapper cows on immaculate meadows.
Most of the elected representatives belong to the Centre party (center-right), formerly the Christian Democratic People's Party (CVP), and to the far-right Democratic Union of the Centre (UDC), the Confederation's leading party, which is sovereignist and openly xenophobic, but has retained the powerful agrarian wing of its origins. Geographically speaking, they tend to live far from the big cities – and their cultural diversity – in the Alpine valleys and landlocked cantons of central Switzerland, known as "primitive Switzerland" because they founded the Confederation in 1291.
Once the sociology of the vote was established, it is interesting to note that it is at odds with the reality of a globalized country open to the four winds. In reality, Switzerland is much more concerned with its status as a champion of technological innovation (number one in the world, according to the latest rankings of the World Intellectual Property Organization, which counts patents) and competitiveness (third place in the world, having long occupied first place).
The man of the moment, "the most powerful man in the Federal Assembly," according to the Zurich daily Tages-Anzeiger, is Markus Ritter, a farmer in the conservative Catholic canton of St. Gallen (northeast). President of the Swiss Farmers' Union (USP) for 11 years, he is the de facto poster boy for the Confederation's most influential lobby. In any case, he ensures that the federal government's decisions never harm farmers.
Above all, Ritter revived the pact that shapes modern Switzerland. At the beginning of the 20th century, farmers formed an alliance with the bourgeoisie as a bulwark against the left. The right, in turn, shielded them from the liberal agricultural policies in vogue – thanks to a generous policy of subsidies and protectionism that would make the apologists of Europe's Common Agricultural Policy green with envy. Bern has the highest agricultural prices in Europe and protects its market from imports. In Switzerland, Argentine beef, for example, has never had the same access it enjoys in the European Union.
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