From Bern to Schaffhausen, cantons have downsized their parliaments. Zurich is now to follow. But there is resistance from a corner.
The 180 members of the Zurich Cantonal Council are currently meeting in an exhibition hall in Oerlikon.
When the Zurich SVP talks about cuts, they usually mean the budget, the tax rate or the administrative staffing plan. But now she wants to put the knife to the heart of democracy: the cantonal parliament. The Zurich cantonal council is to be reduced from 180 to 150 members – or even fewer.
The faction leader of the SVP, Martin Pretty (Wiesendangen), has a corresponding Motion submitted, along with two fellow campaigners from his party. A smaller council is more agile and focused, they argue. They also expect less frustration in office and fewer changes during the legislature, because the individual council members would have more influence.
Such a cut is not without a chance. In the last twenty years, several cantons have downsized their parliaments. Bern, for example, decided in 2002 to go from 200 to 160 seats, Aargau even reduced it from 200 to 140 a year later, and St. Gallen followed in 2007 with a reduction from 180 to 120 members.
Smaller cantons also wanted to be leaner. The people of Schaffhausen, for example, decided in 2004 to reduce the number of seats from 80 to 60.
Even a SP topic
It is not a matter of course that the SVP is behind the planned Zurich cut. In Aargau, in St. Gallen and in Schaffhausen, the FDP was in charge. In Graubünden, a reduction in the size of parliament was a major concern of the SP – but a corresponding initiative was recently withdrawn. Depending on the canton, the governments were sometimes in favor of, sometimes against, downsizing.
Zurich native Martin Prettyr also says that downsizing is not just an SVP issue. “I found supporters and opponents in most parties. In the SVP, too, not everyone is in favor of it.”
Small fractions in particular are critical of the cutback plans. Markus Schaaf (Zell) is the parliamentary group president of the EPP. With eight members, it is the second smallest group in the Zurich Cantonal Council. Only the AL is even smaller.
“The Council should be a realistic reflection of the will of the electorate,” says Schaaf. «That was well achieved today. The relationship between town and country is also right.” For that reason alone there is no reason to change the size of the Council. “180 members are still manageable, you know each other.”
Schaaf believes that the burden would increase, especially for smaller fractions, those with fewer than 15 to 20 members. “The workload would remain the same. There would still be the same amount of commissions and the same amount of business, but the work would be spread out among fewer people.” The EPP cantonal councils are already active in at least one commission.
A smaller cantonal council could develop more in the direction of a professional parliament due to the extra work. “We don’t want that, and I’m sure that the SVP doesn’t want that either,” says Schaaf.
The SVP itself assesses the situation somewhat differently. Experience has shown that the work can be well distributed in the commissions, the three motionmakers write in their application. The work is not getting any smaller, but it can be done more effectively.
“It’s not about a savings plan for us”
It is noteworthy which argument the SVP does not use in its motion: lower costs. “We deliberately didn’t mention the money,” says Martin Pretty. “We are not concerned with a savings proposal, but with a more efficient council operation.” However, he himself is convinced that a smaller council is also cheaper. “There will be fewer advances, and that will also relieve the administration.”
Experiences from St. Gallen partly confirm this tendency. In 2012, after the first full legislature with the smaller parliament, the cantonal government examined how the figures had developed. Parliament had been reduced by a third, from 180 to 120 members. The number of advances also fell, but only by 10 percent, from 733 to 660.
At the time, the government was unable to answer the question of whether the St. Gallen parliament had become more efficient overall as a result of the cut. Factors such as the complexity of deals or the partisan composition of the council made comparison difficult.
For the Zurich SVP it is clear that a mere reduction in the number of members of parliament would not be enough. It must be ensured that the regions continue to be adequately represented, says Schreiner. “I can imagine that we introduce a rule that every constituency must be represented by at least one or two people.” The minimum size of the fractions must also be reduced.
More people, fewer problems?
In certain cantons, which have been driving with a smaller parliament for some time, a certain disillusionment has now set in. In Schaffhausen, where the people had enthusiastically approved the downsizing with over 70 percent yes votes, the presidency of the cantonal council complained a few years later about one increasing time burden and about a growing imbalance between parliament and administration.
Since then, a commission of the Schaffhausen Parliament has been discussing how these problems could be tackled. A proposal that is in the room: an enlargement of the parliament.