Today In The News

Switzerland-wise, there is the exciting news that Christoph Blocher is gone from the federal council, and has been replaced by Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf* (or rather will be replaced at the beginning next year, when it all takes effect, apparently).

The federal council is a group of 7 people, representing the 4 main political parties here, and each councillor is sort of like a minister in Australian politics, I suppose, but they do more than just that (read about it here instead. I don't really know what I am talking about) and they take it in turns to be the president (or whatever it's called) for a year each. Normally federal councillors are re-elected forever and ever (until they retire or die**) but during these elections Blocher was beaten by another candidate from his party when a bunch of centre and lefty types banded together to get him out. Blocher, as you might have gathered, is a bit on the hardcore-right side and is unpopular with many people, and is widely associated with the whole black sheep thing earlier in the year.

Widmer-Schlumpf won the election thing yesterday, and then she took until 8am this morning to decide whether she would accept the position or not (time she no doubt spent being harrassed by various factions within her party. Frankly given the fact that being a federal councillor is the pinnacle of Swiss political achievement and practically guaranteed for as long as you care to do it - as long as you aren't too controversial or too much of a trouble-maker - she would have presumably needed some pretty impressive persuasion to decline). She did accept the role, and consequently the SVP announced that they do not recognise Widmer-Schlumpf and the other SVP person in the federal council as representatives of them (ie. sort of kicked them out of the party), which means that the SVP, the party that got most of the vote at the last election***, is essentially unrepresented in the federal council, and so there is bound to be all sorts of infighting and disagreement and probable splitting (?) of various SVP factions.

In other shiny and exciting news, Marcus Einfeld, former Australian Federal court judge, will be off to trial next year for allegedly perjuring himself and perverting the course of justice when he submitted sworn statements saying that it was, among other people, a woman who was dead at the time, and not he himself, who was driving his car when it got a speeding tickets or ran red lights at various points over the last few years. Ha, I say. And I also say, what's the point in saying it was other people? Yes, you can avoid the fines (a few hundred bucks?) and you can avoid losing the points on your license (it only happened 4 times. Had he lost lots of other points? Was the car going really fast? I don't really remember anything about how many points you have on your license or how quickly you can get them back but it strikes me as reasonably unlikely that he would have lost his license for long, if at all. And what would have been so bad about forcing other people to drive him around for a while? Or taking taxis?), but now maybe he will go to jail for 14 years****. Hah.


* Apparently Schlumpf is the word for "smurf" in german, and, as you would imagine, leads to everyone making boring and predictable jokes about her.
** Wikipedia tells me that 4 federal councillors have been voted out, Blocher now, another dude in 2003 (when Blocher took his place) and two men in the 1800s, so this really is comparable to John Howard and his Bennelong debacle.
*** By which I mean a bigger percentage of the vote than any other party, not an actual majority of the vote. And let's not forget that the proportion of people who actually bother to vote is only half-ish.
**** I believe this is the maximum sentence for everything he is being charged with.