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Again there is a change in personnel in the SVP general secretary. Nidwalden National Councilor Peter Keller will now take over as Secretary General.
Peter Keller will have two functions in the future: that of the National Council and that of the Secretary General.
It will take time to get used to the future constellation of the SVP General Secretariat: an incumbent MP should now assume this important role. It’s Nidwalden’s National Councilor Peter Keller. Generally, there are no active politicians on this switchboard.
As the party’s management committee announced Friday, the committee is proposing Keller as the successor to Emanuel Waeber, who is reducing his workload for reasons of age. According to a press release, Keller will take office on January 1, 2021. The election by the party leadership and the party executive committee is scheduled for October 23, 2020. Keller becomes the most important employee of the recently elected party president Marco Chiesa.
According to former CVP Secretary General Iwan Rickenbacher, it is rare in Switzerland for an active politician to assume leadership of the General Secretariat at the same time. Swiss political scene. Bernhard Pulver had headed the General Secretariat of the Greens before being elected to the governing council of Berne. For André Daguet (sp.), The Secretary General’s office served as a springboard to the national parliament.
Peter Keller has represented Nidwalden on the National Council since 2011.
According to Rickenbacher’s assessment, the extraordinary constellation can lead to a shift in the balance of power within the SVP leadership: “In a way, the new secretary general has more influence than his party president, Marco Chiesa, who he’s just a parliamentarian. ” He suspects that the SVP wanted to endow its Ticino president with a strong personality from German-speaking Switzerland. However, Keller sees no problem in the dual role: “I have to be elected first. So I am still much less influential than the party president or the leader of the parliamentary group. “
Barbara Haering showed that the combination of a National Council mandate and a Secretary General has its pitfalls. The representative of the SP from Zurich served both roles in the 1990s. In 1997 she resigned as Secretary General after Ursula Koch was elected as the new President. Koch and Haering disagreed on several issues. At least for the moment, there is no risk of intolerance in the SVP, as both President Marco Chiesa and Secretary General Peter Keller are new to their offices and have made a conscious decision to work together.
Blocher speechwriter
Peter Keller, 49, has been a member of the National Council since 2011 and has been in charge of the SVP party program since 2018. Keller became known as a personal assistant to Federal Councilor Christoph Blocher. Between 2002 and 2008 he worked as a speechwriter for the then National Council and the Federal Council. As a future secretary general, you see yourself in a service role. “I like to work in the background and not in the spotlight,” says Keller.
His predecessor, Emanuel Waeber, had been secretary general of the party with the largest number of voters since late 2018 and now wants to reduce his workload. He wants to continue to be available to the General Secretariat and the new Secretary General on a part-time basis. Relatively rapid staff changes continue in the SVP General Secretariat. Waeber’s predecessor Dominique Steiner (formerly FDP) left the job after one week.
* Originally, this article said that the combination of Secretary General and Acting Member of Parliament is probably Peter Keller’s first time working. In fact, Barbara Haering (sp.) And Bernhard Hess (Swiss Democrats) actively participated in both functions of their parties.
