61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

the Radical Party leading to a combined list in the Zurich community elections
in 1933. 37 The doctrine and political culture of the Conservatives had a certain
affinity with that of the fronts and until well after 1945 they considered it was
their historical mission to bring about a – conservative – renewal of society. 38 In
November 1932 a tragic clash took place in Geneva where the deployment of
inadequately trained recruits against a demonstration of workers resulted in 13
fatalities and over 80 casualties. Colonel Emil Sonderegger, the troop
commander in the Landesstreik in 1918 who in the meantime had become
involved in the international arms trade and in 1933 had gone over to the fronts,
had no doubt that the events in Geneva were the result of renewed agitation
aimed at political revolt. 39
In the 1930s the democratic model, which provided for a broad level of participation
on the part of citizens (female citizens in conforming with the
bourgeois mentality of the time of course being excluded) and of parliament,
more and more was democratic in appearance only. As early as 1933 Philipp
Etter, who soon after was to be elected to the Federal Council, had announced
that: «Stronger bodies of authority should be reintroduced into our democracy.
Everything which obstructs and cripples authority must cease to exist.» 40 First
the right to democratic participation was curtailed by the so-called emergency
policy in accordance with Article 89, (3) of the Federal Constitution, which
stipulated that the optional referendum could be suspended. 41 In 1934,
parliament subsequently voted, via the emergency procedure, to cut the wages
of government civil servants by 7% although the same wage-cut had been
rejected in a plebiscite in May 1933. 42 However, the anti-parliamentary
currents had still deeper roots. The bourgeoisie still smarted from the introduction
of the fairer proportional representation system in 1918 resulting in the
Social Democrats doubling their number of seats and the Radicals losing more
than one-third of theirs in the 1919 elections. Anti-parliamentarianism in
Switzerland corresponded in many respects to that found abroad, particularly in
the neighbouring countries, where Pierre Laval and Heinrich Brüning were
imposing unpopular measures with emergency decrees in France and Germany
respectively.
The success of the nationalistic front movements, the Swiss variation of fascism,
were not long-lived and restricted to an initial success in 1930–1934 and
another, short «Frontenfrühling» (flourishing of the front movements) in the
autumn of 1940. At the same time, however, the desire for democracy to be
dismantled intensified amongst the respected middle classes with strident
demands for the restriction of parliamentarianism, the end of «party rule» and
the development of a strong leadership. 43 Whilst the fronts remained insignificant
on a political level and only won one parliamentary seat on the Federal
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