Fribourg heads for a political reshuffle, whether it likes it or not

Fribourg is heading into one of those elections politicians like to describe as decisive, which is usually a polite way of saying that a lot of people will keep their jobs while a few others discover the virtues of opposition. On 8 November, the canton will elect its seven-member State Council, its 110-seat Grand Council and the prefects for its seven districts. If no one secures an absolute majority in the first round, the matter will be settled three weeks later, on 29 November. Democracy, Swiss-style: tidy, procedural and determined to make everyone wait a little longer.

The real tension lies in the executive. The current State Council is dominated by the bourgeois parties, with the FDP, The Centre and the SVP holding five of the seven seats. The Greens have one seat and the SP one. In the Grand Council, too, the centre-right camp holds roughly two thirds of the seats, which means the left is not exactly starting from a position of strength.

Still, the composition of the government is set to change noticeably. Four sitting councillors are running again: Didier Castella and Romain Collaud for the FDP, Philippe Demierre for the SVP and Sylvie Bonvin-Sansonnens for the Greens. Three others are stepping down: Jean-Pierre Siggen and Olivier Curty from The Centre, and Jean-François Steiert from the SP. That alone guarantees that at least four of the seven seats will be occupied by new faces after the vote, and possibly more if incumbents fail to survive the first or second round.

The Centre has the awkward task of replacing both of its outgoing councillors and is sending National Councillor Marie-France Roth Pasquier and Grand Councillor Markus Julmy into the race. The SP is fielding three women for Steiert’s seat: Lise-Marie Graden, the current prefect of the Saane district, Grand Councillor Kirthana Wickramasingam and Stephanie Tschopp, a municipal councillor from Schmitten. They are joined by Vincent Pfister of the centre-left ML, Leonardo Gomez Mariaca of the GLP, Sandy Maillard and Alaya Abdulle from the newly formed left-alternative movement Das/Was Freiburg, and Claudio Rugo of the Künstlerklub party.

The alliances are already in place, which saves everyone the trouble of pretending this is a spontaneous civic uprising. The bourgeois parties have agreed on a joint list with five candidates, as have the left-wing parties SP, Greens and ML. The rest are running separately. In practice, the seven seats in the State Council are likely to be decided between those two blocs, while the smaller formations will mainly use the campaign to raise their profile and perhaps pick up a seat or two in the cantonal parliament.

That leaves the key question: can the bourgeois majority hold, or will the left recover the third seat it lost eight years ago? The answer will say something about the canton’s political mood, but also about the limits of coalition arithmetic. In the first round, only those who pass the 50 per cent threshold are elected outright. Everyone else returns for the runoff. It is a system that rewards broad support and punishes fragmentation, which may be why so many parties keep producing lists with the usual solemnity.

For Fribourg, the next weeks will not just decide who sits in the government and parliament until the end of 2031. They will also show whether the canton’s political balance is merely being adjusted, or whether a more substantial shift is under way. The first answer comes on 8 November. The second, for anyone still counting, on 29 November.

Written by Thorben Thiede thorben.thiede@alpineweekly.com