Priska Seiler Graf or the incomprehensible

When Priska Seiler Graf was not yet a member of the National Council, but a little girl in Zurich’s Agglo community in Kloten, she had a big dream: she wanted to be a ballet dancer. She is fascinated by the jumps and pirouettes that the dancers seem to perform effortlessly.

So Priska asks her parents if she can go to ballet class. But they say no. There is only a ballet school in Zurich, and she is not yet allowed to take the train there alone. But Priska does not bury her dream. She gets older, learns to read and discovers an advertisement in the newspaper for a performance by a ballet school in Kloten. She puts the advertisement in front of her parents: “You see, there is also a ballet school in Kloten!”

checkmate. Priska is allowed to go to the ballet.

“My parents had bad cards back then,” says Priska Seiler Graf with a laugh when she tells this childhood anecdote.

She never became a dancer – the talent was not quite enough for a professional career. But that ability, which apparently flashed up in childhood – to argue with facts and to remain persistent – has carried her a long way in her political career: the former secondary school teacher has risen to the national parliament and is scheduled to win the second SP seat in Zurich in February recapture the governing body.

Not only left-wing comrades-in-arms, but also bourgeois politicians attest to the SP woman’s dossier strength, negotiating skills and perseverance. It sounds like this with FDP National Councilor Doris Fiala: “She argues very well and has a high level of commitment.” She stands up for her cause with her head and character and does not seek hasty compromises. The Zurich SVP National Councilor Mauro Tuena also confirms this: In the meetings she is always very well prepared and fights hard but fairly for her concerns.

Completed the slog

Maybe these qualities have something to do with the fact that Priska Seiler Graf always had to fight against political resistance. She has completed what is unflatteringly called a slog. She worked her way up from the local parliament via the cantonal council to the national council. But she was already politicized at home.

Her mother was more inclined to the SP, always well informed about political events, says Seiler Graf. “She impressed me.” However, she had a passionate argument with her father. Mostly about world events. The father was middle-class and was involved in the Kloten city and municipal council. Unusually, as he got older, he tended to move to the left, says Seiler Graf. He joined the LdU and later politicized as an independent.

As a young woman, Seiler Graf was far left. “The SP was too old-fashioned for me, the Juso was still a niche existence at the time.” To her father’s annoyance, she flirted with the communist Progressive Organizations (Poch). “For me, that certainly had something to do with youthful rebellion.” In the end it ends up in the SP. “My father wasn’t thrilled, but he could live with it.” What attracted her to the party was that social justice and people were in the foreground.

As a leftist, she is always in the minority in Kloten’s parliament and later on the city council. That shaped her. You have learned that you have to forge alliances in order to help an idea to achieve a breakthrough. That she needs perseverance and persuasiveness.

It should continue politically for them as well. She is also in the minority in the cantonal council. And when she was elected to the National Council in 2015, she took over a dossier that no one in the Social Democrats was keen on – including Seiler Graf: security policy. The matter then turned out to be exciting, she says today, “the SP must not hide from these issues”.

So Seiler Graf deals with the army, with fighting terrorism, with the Federal Office of Police. As an SP woman, she is an outsider. In order to put pressure on, she is therefore launching high-profile initiatives. Her biggest coup is probably the fight against the purchase of the F-35 fighter jet. She duels in the “Arena” of Swiss television with Federal Councilor Viola Amherd, is in demand as a source of information for the media and is ennobled by the “Weltwoche” as a “heroine of democracy”. In fact, she and her comrades-in-arms manage to collect enough signatures for the initiative that wants to ban the purchase of the F-35.

The matter brings her publicity, but in the end she achieves nothing in terms of content. Because the National Council and the Council of States decide in late summer to give the Federal Council the okay to sign the purchase contract for the new fighter jet. The ink on the treaty is dry before the initiative can be voted on. Seiler Graf and her colleagues withdraw the initiative “with a heavy heart”.

In the SP, the disappointment is mixed with relief. In the government council election campaign, the initiative could have become a mortgage for Seiler Graf. In view of the Ukraine conflict, criticism of the army is currently not in vogue.

The situation illustrates Seiler Graf’s basic problem. In the mostly bourgeois canton of Zurich, the votes from the left alone are not enough to make it into the government council. At the same time, she must mobilize the left to get as many votes as possible from her base. A balancing act.

Far left – or not?

So where does Priska Seiler Graf stand? Or to put it another way: who do you vote for when you elect them to the government council? That can hardly be said, because the national councilor is difficult to grasp. On the one hand, she accuses her own party of making issues such as migration taboo. “We can’t just pretend that nobody cares about this issue, as if there were no problems at all,” she said in an interview with the Tamedia newspapers. She also has the reputation of belonging to the “Realo wing” of the SP.

On the other hand, she appears as a flaming fighter jet opponent and fights alongside the group for a Switzerland without an army (GSoA) for a tightening of arms exports. Her Smartvote profile, which graphically shows her political stance, could hardly be more leftist. When it comes to topics such as the expansion of the welfare state and open foreign policy, she gets maximum approval ratings, but she seems to think little or nothing of liberal economic policy or restrictive migration policy.

Priska Seiler Graf’s smartvote profile

One also encounters contradictions when one asks political companions where Seiler Graf stands politically. Mark Wisskirchen (EPP), who sat with her on the Kloten executive for ten years, says of her that she is not an ideologist, but rather a factual politician. “She is combative, but has always supported the decisions of the bourgeois majority.”

It sounds completely different with Mauro Tuena and Doris Fiala, who sit with her on the National Council’s Security Policy Committee: Tuena says she is in the opposition and lives it. “It depends on the ideology of an eternally peaceful world.” As co-president of the Zurich SP, she represents the party’s program. A program that aims to abolish the army. Doris Fiala also thinks that Seiler Graf clearly represents the opinion of the party. “She sails social democratic close to the wind!”

Andreas Daurú, with whom Seiler Graf shares the SP presidency in the canton of Zurich, describes her as thoroughly pragmatic. “I’m certainly the more ideological of the two of us. But she is also clearly a convinced SP woman. »

How are you supposed to make sense of all this? Even if you ask Priska Seiler Graf herself, you won’t get any wiser: “You play different roles,” she says. As SP president, she reflects pure SP politics, and as a parliamentarian she must be pointed. Especially in the executive she was able to show her pragmatic side. She also fought for her position there, but in the end it was always about finding solutions together.

So Priska Seiler Graf wants to be a bit of both, ideological and pragmatic, depending on the context. Maybe she’s like the agglo she says she loves. “You can still feel the village, but you also have the urban,” says Seiler Graf. So there is something for everyone.

This is how Seiler Graf tries to position himself for the government council election campaign. “My canton should be a canton for everyone,” she writes on her website. There she serves left-wing recipes against the problems of the canton and the world: cheap living space, more bicycles and more public transport in the Agglo. Equal opportunities, solidarity, ecology. At the same time, she emphasizes her solution-oriented side: “I’m an executive type.”

She tries to please everyone, at the price that you don’t really know where you stand with her.

The big successes are missing until now

Priska Seiler Graf has recently suffered two tough defeats. On the one hand, it was outmaneuvered by the Federal Council and Parliament in the fighter jet initiative. On the other hand, she ran unsuccessfully for the national SP presidency. She competed with national councilor Mathias Reynard against the duo of Cédric Wermuth and Mattea Meyer. But at the last moment, Reynard dropped out because he had the chance to be elected to the Valais executive. Seiler Graf had no choice but to withdraw. She is said to have been quite crushed.

The really big political victories have so far been denied to her. When asked about successes, she names the correction initiative, thanks to which the War Material Act has been tightened. In her work at the municipal level, it was more the small things: 15 Tempo 30 zones introduced, an overall traffic concept developed, civil protection regionalized. But this also took a lot of persuasion.

Her record as co-president of the Zurich SP is mixed. She did manage to bring peace back to the divided cantonal section. But the SP suffered heavy losses in the 2022 elections in the canton’s 13 city parliaments: it lost 18 of the previous 141 seats – more than any other party in the canton.

On February 12, Seiler Graf wants to celebrate a success for the party and for himself by winning a seat in the Zurich government council. But it would be a surprise if she succeeded. Because all seven government councilors are running again. In a representative election poll by the NZZ, Seiler Graf made it to 8th place, with a clear gap to the seventh-placed, the director of education Silvia Steiner (middle).

If jumping into the government council is not enough, Priska Seiler Graf will benefit from a lesson that she says she learned in ballet: keep going, even if it hurts.