Good times for the SVP, bad times for almost all other parties

Elections took place in seven cantons last year. When this newspaper took a balance sheet in October, she wrote: « A party clears up »namely the SVP. In six of the seven cantons she was the winner and won a total of 17 seats in the cantonal parliaments. A week ago, on March 2, the canton of Valais was now the first to elect the government and the cantonal council on Sunday. The following still applies: a party clears up.

The SVP continued its triumphal march in Valais, gained four parliamentary seats – as many as now in Solothurn. It is a historical result: After a hundred years, the FDP loses its status as the strongest party in the canton of Solothurn to the SVP, it even falls back to third place behind the SP. It fits that with Sibylle Jeker, an SVP representative in the second ballot on April 13th has good chances to enter the government for the first time.

Political scientist Lukas Golder from GFS Bern explains the success of the SVP with the international zeitgeist, that of a « nationally oriented right with a conservative impact ». In addition, the “pointed style of the party combined with the candidate Jeker” in Solothurn has contributed to the best SVP result since the federal elections.

At the lower end of the ranking, the Greens have had to cope with the greatest losses since the federal elections in October 2023. As early as 2024, they lost a total of 11 seats in the cantonal parliaments. In the Valais the descent continued with minus 5 seats. Solothurn with just a loss of seating is almost a ray of hope for the Greens.

Liberal forces are under pressure

The bottom line of the green liberals lost three cantonal councils last year. The balance sheet was polished up in the small canton of Uri by winning three seats. In Solothurn she now lost two seats and thus the faction strength.

The FDP record is also crossed. She dived in St. Gallen and Uri in 2024, lost in Thurgau, Schwyz and Basel-Stadt and had to give up a total of 9 cantonal council seats. When she gained in Aargau and Schaffhausen last autumn, this was also considered a success for the sharper rhetoric of the party leadership around Thierry Burkart and the tougher asylum course. In the Valais, however, the FDP had to be satisfied with a zero balance. And two seats were lost in Solothurn.

So the new course of the National Party does not have proven itself? This cannot be said in general, says Golder. On the other hand, it is clear that « times for liberal forces are fundamentally difficult ». Nothing will change so soon.

Middle comes out of it unborn

In the meantime, the middle is in a change of feelings. She completed a zero balance last year. In the Valais, she won two seats a week ago. And in Solothurn she got away with it. She keeps her 20 seats in a hundred -person council.

In view of the turbulence around the national party – the resignation of party leader Gerhard Pfister and Federal Councilor Viola Amherd, the chaos in the search for candidates and the negative headlines about Amherds Department – this is remarkable.

The result in Valais suggests that regional factors in the cantons are sometimes more important than the capsols of the national party. For example, with the candidacy by Franziska Biner, who, as Valais-Mitte President, outshone the election campaign and made it into the government with the contestation. With a view to the results in Solothurn and in Valais, Golder says: « The middle is well positioned in its mainlands, despite the current turbulence. »

SP benefits hardly from green weakness

Seen over all cantonal elections, a clear legal slip can be observed in Switzerland. This is also due to the fact that, unlike now in Solothurn, where a seat from the Greens moves to the SP, the SP did not benefit from the losses of the sister party in several cantons. GFS Politologist Golder explains this, among other things, with a « poorer mobilization of the SP base outside the large agglomerations ».

In Solothurn, the turnout was around 35 percent, around 8 percent lower than in the last cantonal elections. Obviously, the SVP has better managed to move their electorate to the urns than the political competition from FDP to the Greens.