Gerhard Pfister tries again

Gerhard Pfister got to a point this Saturday at the middle delegates’ meeting in Näfels in the canton of Glarus where he had been before: in the same office, at a different time.

In 2016, Pfister took over the then CVP as president and first called for a debate on values. At a delegates’ meeting in Appenzell, he spoke about terrorism in Europe and spoke out against radical Islam, against the burqa, and for “Christian democratic values”. He said people had been tolerant of the intolerant for too long. It was his first foray into content, and the party (particularly on its progressive wing) felt frightened rather than understood.

In the years that followed, Pfister no longer worked primarily on the content, not even on the label, but on the packaging of his party. He became a Christo of politics, he merged the CVP with the BDP and gave it a new shell: the center. It could have been a different name, Pfister once said: “I have no preference, I just want success.”

Pfister’s plan was to first change the form of his heterogeneous party, ideally to achieve initial successes, and then to change the content on this basis.

return of history

Now, in the sixth year of his presidency, Gerhard Pfister apparently feels he has enough legitimacy to try a debate on values ​​again. His party no longer only has failures in elections, but also successes again – and he himself is so undisputedly its dominant figure in the media that he has immunized himself against internal criticism.

In his speech at the delegates’ meeting in Näfels, Grosse Linien politician Pfister spoke about the war in Ukraine. It was a speech with which he still positioned the center as a party of conservative values: “We are witnessing the return of history,” he said, “the West cannot simply be a value-free business platform for everyone, as the globalization elite thinks it is by FDP and sometimes also GLP.»

Pfister did not explicitly call for a value debate in Näfels, as he did in Appenzell, but a short sentence implicitly connected his current speech with his speech at the time. It doesn’t matter, he said, where the attack on our society came from: “Whether through Islamist attacks or through Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, a European country.” So everything should have a certain logic.

Value wing, solidarity wing

At the end of his speech it was clearer than before where the middle could lie in the political geography: a party that differentiates itself from the SVP by seeing Switzerland as a member of Christian Democratic Europe, the West. And a party that differentiates itself from the FDP and the GLP by not primarily representing liberal principles, but rather conservative values.

In his speech on Switzerland’s role in the face of war, Gerhard Pfister tried to unite his two party wings. He called for an independent sanctions policy in Switzerland that does not simply follow what the European Union says with a time lag. And he said: “Everything has to lead to the question: ‘When does neutrality become indecent?'”

The delegates applauded his speech enormously. In contrast to his first debate on values, when Pfister only made an offer to the conservative wing of the party with his criticism of Islam and migration, he reconciled the conservative wing within his party with his criticism of globalization and neutrality with the progressive solidarity wing.

At the beginning of his presidency, Gerhard Pfister wanted to talk about content. Then he gave his party new packaging instead. He has since tagged her too. Now, not too soon, it’s about content.