Ladies Last

Breaking the magic spell

For a quarter-century Switzerland has led a charmed political life, thanks largely to a "magic formula" that left little room for opposition to government policy. The scheme's principal feature was the inclusion of representatives of all four major political parties on the seven-man Federal Council that serves as the quadrilingual nation's governing body.

But last week a singularly discordant note was struck in the finely tuned harmonies of Swiss political life. Forgoing customary politesse, the leaders of the Social Democratic Party, the country's second largest, accused their conservative coalition partners of "arrogance" and voted to walk out of the coalition. The issue that precipitated such un-Swiss behavior: Parliament's rejection of the first woman ever to be nominated for the august Federal Council.

If anyone should have sent the sexual walls tumbling down, it was Lilian Uchtenhagen, 55. An economist, she had compiled a distinguished record as president of the finance commission in the lower house of Parliament and served on the board of directors of a major Zurich retail chain. As the wife of a prominent Swiss psychiatrist and the mother of three adopted children from Madagascar, Uchtenhagen has a touch of the hausfrau that, it was thought, would make her acceptable to her male colleagues in government. Convinced that Uchtenhagen was well qualified for the job, the Social Democratic Party nominated her to fill a vacancy left when one of the two Social Democrats on the Federal Council resigned. Under the unwritten rules of the magic formula, Uchtenhagen should have been a shoo-in.

The Social Democrats, however, underestimated the resistance of male politicians in a country that did not even allow women to vote in national elections until 1971, and that still does not in certain local contests. Meeting in the smoke-filled bars of Bern to plot their strategy, members of Parliament (in which women fill only 25 out of 246 seats) grumbled that Uchtenhagen was "too emotional," "unable to stand the strain of high office," "too elegant" and "not enough of a mother figure." When they returned to the lower-house chamber after their informal evening debate, they rejected Uchtenhagen by a vote of 124 to 96, choosing instead a little-known outsider who did not even have the support of his own party.

Complained Uchtenhagen: "I am supposed to be at the same time ambitious, cold, hard, ruthless and a crybaby. It does not make sense."

Many Swiss women felt betrayed by the vote. "We live in a patriarchal society," proclaimed Marie-Therese Gwerder, Switzerland's most popular television announcer. Said Leni Robert, an independent member of Parliament:

"They are afraid of intelligent women."

In fact, public opinion polls taken before the vote showed that 64% of citizens thought it was time to have a woman at the highest level of government. Said the Zurich tabloid Blick: "The people wanted Lilian, but the gentlemen in Bern elected a man." Swiss women refer to the day of the vote, Dec. 7, as Black Wednesday.

Rank-and-file Social Democrats will gather in Bern in February to ratify their leaders' decision to leave the coalition. The outcome of the vote is not certain. Even if the party goes into opposition, Switzerland will no doubt remain a model of economic and political stability. But for Swiss men the experience may serve as a warning that it takes more than a magic formula to preserve harmony at home.