Swiss Think Tanks Speak Out
In a Thursday, 30 November 2006 "Ideas Fair" at Technopark Zurich, the Swiss political think tanks Avenir Suisse (i.e. "Swiss Future", group headed by Thomas HELD) and Liberales Institut(Robert NEF), together with a dozen groups with similar activities, presented their concepts for initiating political and economical reform in Switzerland. Among the central subjects discussed was the question why Switzerland is so much behind schedule - in contrast to many countries in Europe with a heavy socialist tradition - when it comes to break down state monopolies.
It was found that the multi-layer federalist system demands extremely fine-tuned long-term campaigning in order to win the confidence of voters. Political analyst Claude Longchamps pointed to example of the popular vote in 2004 on stem cell legislation - the most liberal in Europe - for the sometimes excellent results of a more technically than politically inspired campaigning. Martine Brunschwig-Graf, a liberal Congresswoman from Geneva, called for a serious effort to define liberalism as a "state of the mind" and for more encouragement for individual citizen to take risks, to succeed or to fail without beeing punished by rigid regulations.
There were calls for serene optimism for the national elections of 2007 among warnings of a slow but inexorable decline of the welfare state into general depression. It was a meeting that clearly showed the enormous difficulties to implement change in a system full of perfectly interconnected stakeholders on every possible level of political decisionmaking.
One participant privately talked of "Leibeigenschaft im Sozialstaat" ("wellfare state slavery")...