The controversial quorum in Zurich elections usually causes problems for the EPP and the center. This time it prevented two seats from the Free List and one from the PdA.
The electoral system determines to a large extent who gets seats in Parliament and who doesn’t.
Things couldn’t have gone better for the EPP and the center on Sunday. They didn’t have to tremble for long, because after two out of nine counted constituencies it was already clear that both parties would be represented in the new parliament. The EPP had cleared the 5 percent hurdle in district 12, the center in district 9. The quorum works in such a way that a party only gets seats if it receives at least 5 percent of the votes in a constituency.
Seat distribution in the constituencies opaque
The 5 percent hurdle was invented by the Zurich Cantonal Council because it was of the opinion that the new Pukelsheim election procedure would otherwise lead to a fragmentation of the votes. However, because many smaller parties felt that the hurdle created a new injustice in an electoral system that was much fairer in itself, they made political and legal efforts to abolish it, but all attempts failed.
Because of the quorum, the EVP fell out of the city parliament in 2014, four years later it hit the CVP, which is now called Mitte. Both made it into the municipal council this time, but now other groups were affected that would have liked to get involved in Zurich city politics. If you calculate the results from Sunday without a quorum, the Corona measures critics of the Freie Liste Züri would have received 2 seats, the Labor Party (PdA) 1. The SP, GLP and Mitte would each have lost 1 seat.
The Pukelsheim process gives the parties as many seats as their share of voters in the entire city corresponds to and is therefore much more transparent and fairer than the old system. However, the so-called sub-allocation, i.e. the distribution of the party seats won among the constituencies, usually seems a bit puzzling – to put it mildly. The seat gains of FL Züri and PdA would have set in motion an actual seat castling, in which there would have been five losers, but also two additional winners.
Josua Dietrich (district 11) and Regina Müller (7+8) would have been elected from the free list, and Rita Maiorano (4+5) from the PdA. Because the PdA would have won in district 4+5, one seat too many would have been allocated there; in the final calculation, the FDP would have had to give up one again. This would have been compensated with an additional seat in district 9, where the SP would have had to give up one. In this way the dance would have moved on nicely.
So some of those elected would have had to do without again, others who didn’t make it on Sunday would suddenly have made it into the city parliament. In district 9, for example, the handicap lobbyist Alijaj Islam from the SP would have lost his mandate. Lukas Walther would have benefited from the FDP, which has overtaken some on the list before him, including the previous Marcel Müller. Lukas Walther is well connected in the neighborhood and made a name for himself last year with a well-received campaign for the presidency of the Letzi school district.
Sobernheim would be out
The most prominent victim of the castling would have been the high-profile GLP traffic politician Sven Sobernheim, who narrowly managed to win the election on Sunday. However, the GLP list in district 11 was also very explosive and caused a few surprises. The best performer on the list was former radio presenter Patrick Hässig, and the city council candidate for the young GLP, Serap Kahriman, also pressed the previous ones.
In the end, Kahriman got two votes more than Sobernheim, who was still able to hold on. The previous Markus Merki, who missed the re-election, fared less well. Merki made a name for himself in the last legislature because he chaired the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the incidents in waste disposal and recycling in Zurich.
In 2011, an individual initiative was rejected in Zurich, which had suggested that the quorum in parliamentary elections should not be abolished entirely, but rather reduced. According to this, a party should have had access to parliament if it had gained at least 2 percent of the votes in a district.
If this variant had applied to the elections, the PdA would not have won a seat, but the two seats for the Free List would have been secured anyway. Although it only achieved 1.3 percent of voters in the city as a whole, it got 2.4 percent of the votes in district 7+8 and would have gotten into the distribution of seats. The PdA, on the other hand, stayed just below the 2 percent in their best circle (4+5) with 1.8 percent.
Green liberals helped Michael Baumer
Incidentally, the Green Liberals not only won the parliamentary elections on Sunday (increase in the number of voters by 2.5 to 13 and the number of seats by 3 to 17), they may also have made a decisive contribution to the fact that the liberal Michael Baumer made it back into the city council and the AL challenger Walter fear has to stay outside.
A post-election survey by the Tamedia newspapers shows that Baumer also received a large number of votes from the Green Liberals. Almost 60 percent of GLP voters included Baumer on their list. There were almost the same number of Mitte supporters, and the figure for SVP voters even rises to 67 percent. The AL and Greens only gave support in the single-digit percentage range, while SP supporters still had 15 percent.
What is striking about Walter Angst is that he was not warmly supported by Greens voters (68 percent) – and even less by SP supporters. This is probably related to the fact that the AL and especially Walter Angst did not hold back with clear criticism of the policy of the SP. For this, more than 20 percent of the Mitte and GLP voters each wrote fear on the ballot paper.