Shortly before his 91st birthday, the former politician of the National Action and the successor party Swiss Democrats died. He was a member of the National Council and an organic farmer. But his commitment to nature had controversial facets.
“Stop murdering the earth!” Former National Councilor Valentin Oehen is dead.
Just why? Why did Valentin Oehen want to get back into politics at the age of 75? SRF asked the actual pensioner in 2006.
Oehen stood in a pasture for the “Tagesschau” contribution, cows in the background. Clutching a briefcase to his chest, he said firmly, “Because my fighting spirit is unbroken and my love for this country is still so dominant that I’m not willing to just sit in a waiting room somewhere and wait for my death. »
Appearances at the Pnos
There was enthusiasm in word and attitude. Oehen had just saddled his hobbyhorse again: the fight against alleged overpopulation to protect nature. As a figurehead of the Swiss Democrats (SD), he wanted to prevent the “Lex Koller” from being abolished.
The law restricting the purchase of real estate by foreigners remained in place. Oehen’s comeback and the SD hardly had an impact. It was his last significant engagement. Most recently, he appeared at meetings of the far-right party National Oriented Swiss (Pnos). Now he died in Nottwil (LU) on June 2nd. At the end of the month he would have been 91 years old.
Oehen was one of the most controversial figures of his generation. It is probably also easy to see from his person how key issues of our time have moved into certain political camps. Environmental protection today has something more global than homeland protection at that time. Right-wing national parties sometimes blame him on foreigner issues and are quickly exposed. The Greens are now doing without this chaining.
In Oehen’s time it was different. As President of the SD’s predecessor party, he was already a critic of the constant growth in the 1970s. As a member of parliament for the National Action for People and Homeland (NA), he was an environmentalist from the very beginning. So he embodied red and green concerns. But: Some also said he had “brown” views, such as Hans Beat Schaffner, the founding president of the Greens in Zurich. Among other things, the Greens were set up to prevent “people around the then NA boss Valentin Oehen from making ecological issues a topic for the Browns”.
About the milk to his political ideology
At Oehen, protecting the environment was always accompanied by the issue of population and immigration. In 2014 he told the newspaper “Der Bund”: “An ecological policy without taking demographics into account is not possible.”
Oehen grew up in the canton of Lucerne as the son of a master cheese maker and then studied dairy farming at the ETH. In the 1980s he became an organic farmer in Ticino. His political commitment was a consequence of his work on a dissertation on “bacteria important to the dairy industry”, Oehen told the “Weltwoche” in December 2021. He had become aware that constant growth on a physical level ends in catastrophe. That’s why he was committed to nature conservation “and against the artificial increase in population, foreign infiltration”.
He thus represented an ideology that, early in his political career, was hardly capable of winning a majority. At the end of the 1960s, he appeared nationally in connection with the “foreign infiltration initiative” and was regarded as James Schwarzenbach’s foster son. During his time as a member of the National Council, in addition to the Schwarzenbach initiative, further requests against the feared foreign infiltration went down the drain. Oehen was also the founder of the working group on population issues, now called Ecopop, which suffered another defeat in a 2014 initiative against overpopulation.
Oehen campaigned against leaded petrol and for free public transport. He coined the slogans: “Stop murdering the earth!” and «Let it be green». But if he took part in nuclear power plant protests, he was mobbed by the left. The green at that time was still very right.