Erik Reumann, Who Was Born in Zurich, Completed His Higher Education in Geneva Where He Obtained a Degree in International Relations

Bundesversammlung

Assemblée fédérale

Assemblea federale

Federal Assembly

And meanwhile, backstage …

When you pace up and down the corridors of the Federal Parliament you normally meet three identifiable types of staff: the visitors’ guides, the security guards and the ushers. The first type, who are not in uniform, point out the Three Swiss Men who greet you – with just a hint of disapproval – at the top of the staircase in the entrance hall. They also explain the meaning of the friezes that decorate the walls and tell you the origin of the marble under your feet. They also point out that the arms of the Jura – which became an independent canton only in 1978 – have evidently not been given a place in the circle of cantonal arms that decorate the dome above the entrance hall. They sit there all alone under a nearby archway. If you turn round during your guided tour you will see that a young man or woman in a light blue uniform and carrying a weapon is following your every step throughout the tour. This is the second and highly visible group of employees that haunt the building. They will make sure that you don’t lose your way in the labyrinth of corridors, of course, but will also kindly point you towards the lavatories should you need them. Until the famous shooting in the Zug cantonal parliament in 2001 it was relatively easy to enter the federal parliament building, but now you have to show identity and justify your visit. The third category of employees which you cannot miss, especially when parliament is sitting, is of course the ushers, recognisable in their bottle-green uniforms. You will see them moving around the benches of the National Council chamber or the Council of States chamber, distributing post or documents to the members of parliament, passing on messages from outside or making sure that every member has a bottle of mineral water within reach. When parliament is not sitting you will find them lurking in the lobbies of the committee rooms, looking after the every needs of committee members and ensuring that their meetings are kept confidential. These are just the most obvious members of the staff of 300 who fill the 215 jobs in the parliament building. They have multiplied in number by a factor of almost 8 over the past three decades. “When I started working here, that was in 1976, there were only about 40 of us”, recalls Vitus Ritler, head of the parliamentary ushers, who clearly has a certain nostalgia for the family atmosphere that prevailed in the old days. As numbers have grown, the staff has spread well beyond the confines of the Federal Parliament. They have infiltrated the adjoin- ing buildings occupied by the various federal offices and spread to the neighbouring streets. Feeling somewhat cramped in this environment, which turns into a real hive of activity during the four annual parliamentary sessions (one per season) plus any extraordinary sessions that are required, the members of parliament actually approved a sum of CHF 35 million for the construction of a brand-new press centre opposite the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. This means that journalists no longer occupy precious space in the Federal Parlia-

ment, although they still have two rooms there that are reserved for their exclusive use. They still clutter up the lobby, harassing the ushers until they bring out parliamentarians from the chamber in the hope of getting answers to their questions, comments and confidences. The acute problem of space in the parliament building became especially serious in 1992 when 24 permanent committees – 12 per chamber – were set up. While their task is to ensure better monitoring of the federal administration, which has been steadily expanding over the years, and to improve legislative activities, their creation necessitated in turn the setting up of specialised secretariats. These offices collaborate closely with the chairs of the committees, who prepare meetings, draw up reports and ensure that the members of the committees are provided with adequate documentation. These men and women, who are often highly qualified, work in the shadows and enable the members of parliament to deal with the enormous amount of work that they are given, even when parliament is not sitting. The Parliamentary Control of the Administration (PCA) is without any doubt a special case among the staff that provide the back-up for the political activities of the committees and is a perfect example of the magnanimity and the constraint of the men and women who devote their working lives to this cause. To illustrate the work of the PCA, its head, Daniel Janett, likes to quote the following anec- dote from Britain’s colonial history. In order to deal with an invasion of snakes, the British Raj offered a reward for each snake’s head handed in to the authorities. The result was that the Indian population started breeding cobras to provide the heads and collect the money. This little story illustrates perfectly how a public policy based on the best of intentions can go haywire. The task of Daniel Janett and his staff of five at the PCA is to identify any such shambles. This department of the federal administration was set up in 1991, shortly before the permanent committees were introduced. At various times – in particular when the secret federal files on private individuals were discovered – members of parliament were made aware of their lack of control over the federal administration, which had meanwhile expanded consid- erably and become interventionist. The PCA was therefore set up to provide support for the parliamentary Control Committees, alongside the secretariats of the Control Committees and the Finance Committee (FC), a much older institution. Unlike the PCA, the FC operates in- dependently of the two chambers of parliament and the Federal Council, but reports to the Finance Delegation. The PCA is not independent in that it reports to the Control Committees of the two chambers. “We work on the basis of tasks allotted to us by the parliamentary committees”, explains Daniel Janett. Nonetheless, the PCA submits proposals to committee members. You have to have a nose for the job: issues have to be selected for investigation which correspond to the concerns of the parliamentary world. But in a world where the general public is becoming more discerning as to the performance of public bodies there is no lack of such concerns. One shouldn’t imagine that the PCA operates like the Spanish inquisition, however. The atmosphere in the PCA offices close to the Federal Parliament is quiet and serious, more like a university library than a police station. The team is made up of geographers, economists and political scientists. “We use internationally recognised methods in our evaluations”, Daniel Janett emphasises. Having clear criteria for their job is essential for gaining the trust of all parties concerned. It must be said, however, that the federal administration does not always

welcome the PCA investigators. “But generally any scepticism disappears quite quickly once they’ve understood that we operate according to strict regulations”, explains the head of the PCA. This does not mean that their investigations leave everyone satisfied, however. The report on the Federal Inventory of Landscapes and Sites of Historical and Natural Interest published in 2003, for example, caused some bad feeling among many parliamentarians. To put it politely but clearly, the PCA concluded that the policy aimed at preserving sites of natural interest is a failure. The report not only criticises the imbalance between the resources used and the ambitious aims but also points out that the fact that the inclusion of sites in the inventory has often not prevented their deterioriation. In short, if the policy has not led to action as counter- productive as breeding cobras, it has been equally ineffective. Hugo Fasel, Chairman of the National Council Control Committee in 2004-2005, feels that the PCA deserves full marks for its work. “They do a good job which is extremely useful for us”, says the National Councillor from Fribourg. A job which enables parliamentarians to shine when the results are presented, the real authors of the report remaining modestly in the shadows. But the mission of the PCA can well be considered a “noble” task in that it is still a political one. Other more mundane tasks are the daily bread of many other employees who work for the two chambers. Printing and distributing papers, for example. And here we enter the bow- els of the parliament building. Seen from the square in front, this massive building does not give the impression that it has four storeys below ground, camouflaged in the wall that looks out over the River Aare. The little printing room ruled by Werner Kuenzi is in the first-floor basement, right next to the dispatch room. Despite the enormous progress made by information technology and the internet over recent years, paper is still paramount in the Swiss parliament. “We use about 130 pallets per year”, Werner Kuenzi informs us, his eyes twinkling over his reading glasses. “We make about 7 million copies a year!” That’s just about one copy per head of the Swiss population, including babies and foreigners. Parliamentary bills, minutes, documents drawn up by the various committees: week after week there is a real avalanche of paper that lands on the desks of the 246 elected members of the Federal Assembly. All these papers are sent out by post on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “We send about 1 kg of documentation to each member of parliament every week”, explains Vitus Ritler, who also supervises the dispatch room. And this documentation has to be sort- ed. “It takes me more or less two hours a day to sort the post and the documentation that I receive every day”, says Urs Schwaller, a member of the Council of States, with a sigh. Andrea Nuzzolo, a member of the parliamentary IT team, tells us that a project is underway to enable members to deal with their documentation through an intranet site. But at the moment there is little chance that the volume of paper consumed will be reduced. “The members just don’t want to have to print off the documents they receive themselves”, says Wer- ner Kuenzi. Parliamentarians do learn fast, however, according to Andrea Nuzzolo. Today a growing number of them are already computer-literate when they are elected. And the others are

making rapid progress, thanks in part to the IT department, which is making enormous efforts in this respect. “We are totally customer-orientated. When parliament is sitting we never leave before all re- quests have been met”, Andrea Nuzzolo assures us. And you can quite often find him in the lobby with his colleague Christoph Peter bent over the wayward laptop of a member, patient- ly trying to identify the problem. As a rule this devotion to duty results in the equivalent of a week of overtime to be taken when the parliamentary session is over. “We have to ensure that the members of the chambers have a total trust in us”, underlines Andra Nuzzolo. “Letting us have access to their computers, they allow us to penetrate an im- portant part of their private lives”, he continues. Discretion is essential. But the obvious good nature of Nuzzolo and his colleague works wonders. Especially since they have a broad vi- sion of their job. In principle, the Parliamentary Services are responsible only for the computer programmes that they have installed themselves in machines provided for elected members. But Nuzzolo and his coleagues always have time to discuss a software problem that does not concern them directly. “We often call the computer specialists from the companies where the members work to try to solve problems with their help”, he explains. It is true that the laptops are real mobile offices for these men and women who are always on the move. “One of them, a farmer, has installed a complete system for managing his pigs: everything’s there, including the weight of each animal!”, the specialist from Biel tells us with a smile. The problems that have to be solved may be quite simple or really complicated. For example, how to manage e-mail archives that sometimes contain up to to forty thousand message. In this case, it’s like looking for the proverbial needle in the no less proverbial haystack. To deal with this type of problem, the Parliamentary Services offer their protégés computer courses, sometimes for groups, sometimes for individuals. “Whenever they’ve got time”, emphasises Nuzzolo, as helpful as ever. The IT team also have to decide every four years which laptop will be given to members at the start of the legislative period. The computer, which will be theirs after the four-year period, is subjected to stringent tests. “We even check whether it will survive a cup of coffee being accidentally spilt on the keyboard”, Nuzzolo tells us with a grin. Later it turned out that it couldn’t cope with champagne! The appearance of the machine is a minor aspect. One laptop which the IT team really liked because of its impeccable design was quickly eliminated from the choice. “We dropped it from a height of 1m 50 cm and it broke into smithereens”, the specialist recalls. This was lucky for a less elegant but more robust competitor. But after being used for two years the chosen model presented a problem: certain members use their laptops so frequently that the symbols on the keys wear off. “We have to change the keyboards”, says Nuzzolo, still flab- bergasted by the fact. In the parliament building members can use a WiFi connection through which they can access the internet directly from their seat in the chamber. In the past members used to make a show of being bored by reading a newspaper, but now they can overcome their boredom by surfing on the net! And what’s more, seen from the gallery, they appear to be working!

On a more serious note, they can also access many, highly useful documents. For example, the minutes of full sessions (see Official Bulletin at www.parlement.ch). Using this facility they can remind an adversary who has just spoken that he said exactly the opposite during the previous parliamentary session. Or a member can locate a comment made by a Federal Councillor showing that the government is in favour of the idea proposed. When parliament is sitting it is on the second basement floor of the Federal Parliament that one can find those discrete workers who ensure that everything that is said in the chambers goes down on paper to be stored in the archives. In a semi-circular corridor directly below the Galerie des Alpes and the lobby can be found some twenty small wooden cabins containing computers. In each cabin there is a parliamentary employee wearing earphones who types non-stop on a keyboard. This is the Official Bulletin service, which faithfully transcribes the flood of words spoken hour after hour under the dome of the parliament building! From his glass-fronted office facing the cabins, François Comment, chief editor of the Official Bulletin, keeps a beady eye on the work being done. This service employs some forty people, a large number of whom work part-time and/or work from home. They deal with both the parliamentary sessions and the committee meetings, the chief editor explains. Obviously work is more intense when parliament is sitting and often continues well into the night, while the members themselves have already gone home or to their hotel rooms in Berne. The computer programme used for this work was developed jointly by the Parliamentary Services and an outside company. It was introduced at the end of 1999 and enables the spoken word to be recorded, work to be divided up and priorities in the transcriptions to be set. A “director” who works nearby in the Council chambers adds essential information to each recording: the name of the speaker, document references and results of any votes that are taken. Thanks to this system, any member of the general public can read on the parliament’s website what is said in the two chambers only an hour after the words have actually be spoken. The service produces around thirty thousand A4 pages of transcription each year. Half of it is not accessible to the public, however, since it is the minutes of committee meetings that are confidential. Not a single parliamentary correspondent could manage without the electronic version of the Official Bulletin today. It is justifiably the pride of the Swiss parliament. “It has won several prizes”, François Comment tells us proudly. An abridged version used for writing minutes of committee meetings has even been adopted by the German parliament. While the internet is the main tool used today, the Official Bulletin is still circulated in printed form and on DVD. It should be noted that the spoken word is always transcribed in the original language. And this is another particularity of the Swiss parliament: the use of three languages. It must be said that the members from the Tessin do tend to make a sacrifice in that they express themselves in French or German most of the time. But on occasion, just to remind everyone that Italian is also one of the three official languages of Switzerland, an Italian-speaking member will resort to Dante’s language. While most members can speak a second national language to a sufficient standard, no-one wants plenary sessions to become the tower of Babel.

And this is where the simultaneous translators come in. This is an extremely intense job where every word is of importance. When parliament is sitting, 9 people – 3 for each official language – take turns working for 45 minutes in glass cabins set up at the level of the visitors’ gallery on each side of the semicircular chamber. Simultaneous translation into French and German has been provided since 1960, Italian being added only in 2003. Only the Na- tional Council enjoys this privilege. In the Council of States it is assumed that everyone can understand the other languages spoken. The simultaneous translators must constantly revise their vocabulary. “The dominant topics regularly change. At the moment ecology is mentioned less frequently. No doubt because the necessary decisions have now been taken”, observes Thomas Bernath, who heads the small team of simultaneous translators. “In the eighties, the topic was on everyone’s lips: people had to establish their position”. Apart from having a highly technical vocabulary the translators also have to get used to the particular characteristics of each speaker. Professional to the end, Thomas Bernath refuses to say which parliamentarian he dreads most as a speaker. “Speeches that are incoherent through lack of logic are the most difficult to translate”, he adds confidentially. The translators also have to keep up with speakers who are in a hurry. “When Federal Coun- cillor Kaspar Villiger got up to speak we knew we had to go into overdrive”, says Bernath with a smile. It isn’t always easy to get over the exact sense of what has been said. “ The Ger- man-speakers sometimes use dialect words: it’s very difficult to capture the exact nuance then”, Thomas Bernath adds somewhat dispairingly. But the real challenge to the simultaneous translators is to provide a version that can be understood by the general public, by those people who come to see parliament in action from the visitors’ gallery. “Do they always understand our translation?”, he wonders. For Bernath the problem is less a question of technical terms than a certain way of express- ing ideas. For example, the word “Leitplanke” (guardrail in English), which is used quite a lot. The German-speaking member who uses it generally wishes to imply a normative frame- work, a sort of abstract limit that must not be exceeded. “In parliament I translate this as ‘garde-fou’ (railing). Within the Swiss parliament everyone understands that. But I would probably never use the word in that way in a different context”, he explains. The Federal As- sembly is a culture of its own. And that goes for the food too. Drinks, apéritifs and other buffets break up the monotony of the debates and committee meetings. The winter session is the high season in parliament. The celebrations at the end of the year are always a good opportunity to mark the end of the year with a slap-up meal and a good bottle of wine. Incidentally, some of these events are paid for by the cantonal authorities or other political or business organisations. But the parliament also makes an effort to organise its own get-togethers. “ I organise about 70 a year” explains Marianne Gruber, a lively brunette who looks as if she comes from a Mediterranean country but is actually from the Bernese Oberland. And since she took on her present job she has overturned a few little habits that were well established in this sector. “I didn’t understand why we always had to serve wine from Vaud or the Valais”, she recalls. “After all, there are only two half-cantons in the whole of Switzerland that don’t produce any wine”. Result: the house wine comes from a different area each year.

Marianne Gruber asks a few wine producers from one canton to send her some samples. “In general, they are very proud to have been asked and bend over backwards to get my order”, she explains. The journalists accredited to the federal parliament are also involved in the se- lection process; those with the finest noses are invited to the tasting. But this is a serious business – everyone has to make careful notes about each wine they taste. The producer whose wine obtains the best average is awarded the order: 100 bottles of white, 70 of red. In the view of the 246 members of parliament this isn’t an enormous quanti- ty. Marianne Gruber’s golden rule is “We only serve Swiss products”. And since this “law” was passed, champagne – a product of France – has disappeared from the parliament’s wine cellar! Marianne Gruber has also stopped ordering buffet food and other snacks from a department store near the parliament. “They were too expensive. I’ve since found a small caterer who can give us a good price”, she explains. “If we’re catering for under 70 people I manage my- self”, explains this young woman with a vast experience of waitressing. “If there are more I employ some extra help”. But often it’s just a matter of organising coffee and croissants for a committee which is meeting at dawn or buying sandwiches when they have decided not to break for lunch. If a Federal Councillor is involved Marianne Gruber decides to do a bit of culinary espion- nage. In general the ushers attached to the Federal Councillors can give her some helpful advice. For example, she provided apple juice for Adolf Ogi and soft cheeses for Kaspar Vil- liger. Basically it’s a question of helping them get through the endless hours they have to spend in the building. And who knows? Maybe certain politicians owe their greatest political successes to these little attentions from the staff of the Parliamentary Services.

Erik Reumann, who was born in Zurich, completed his higher education in Geneva where he obtained a degree in international relations. Having spent a training period with the Nouveau Quotidien, he worked in Moscow for seven years, first as spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross and later as an independent correspondent for the Swiss- French television, Le Temps, and various other publications. After returning to Switzerland, he first worked for the Swiss News Agency before being appointed parliamentary correspondent for La Liberté, the Fribourg daily newspaper.