The elite hunter is back. Hanspeter Kriesi once annoyed the powerful of Switzerland with his studies. Today he says: "The SVP is not a danger to democracy."

The elite hunter is back. Hanspeter Kriesi once annoyed the powers of Switzerland with his studies. Today he says: "The SVP is not a danger to democracy." He founded modern Swiss political science, knows no television political scientists, and does not believe in the downfall of democracy: an approach to a willful rationalist. As Hanspeter Kriesi knew the Swiss elite better than anyone else, when he interviewed, researched, and described their functioning in 782 pages in minute detail, they exacted their revenge, albeit late but perceptible. It was 1979, and Kriesi, the son of a wine merchant from Eastern Switzerland, was just rising in the sluggish ivory tower of Swiss academia at a fast pace. A sociologist, 31 and already close to habilitation. A numbers person, whose network analyses and regression coefficients could bring a smile to his bearded face. This was Kriesi then, and he is still so today. And he also assures now, fifty years after the small incident he triggered, that it was never about politics or polemics, about subversion or revolt. But only about science. Dry, exact, measurable social sciences. Unfortunately, his research subjects – the most powerful men and (very few) women of Switzerland – saw it quite differently. What Kriesi presented then as the result of five years of research and 300 hours of interviews was suitable to shake a self-understanding that still shapes Switzerland today: that of a country without an elite. One in which power is distributed among institutions and state levels and resides mainly with the people. Not with influential, possibly even unusual individuals. And now this researcher came and presented a ranking of the 25 most powerful men in Switzerland. And at number 1 was: a civil servant. When he tells of this today, almost fifty years later, a gentle smile still slips into the face of Hanspeter Kriesi, who is now 77. Was he not trying to kick the powerful a little bit under the leg back then? "I only said what is," says Kriesi. "I did not think any evil of it." It was later that he realized how much aversion there was to his study. Then, when he, the young shooting star of his field, sought the next position at a German-speaking university – and suddenly only received rejections. The "Cronyocracy" in Sight Switzerland, which the young Kriesi researched in the 1970s, is a Switzerland that no longer exists. A country ruled by a network of associations, interest groups, and party committees. By a network of business, university, and administrative personnel linked through militia offices in politics and the military. "Cronyocracy" was what critics called this system. Defenders spoke against it, describing it as a well-oiled consensus machine that successfully led Switzerland through boom and crisis years. To research this machine, Kriesi used a technique he had learned in the USA: measuring power by its gradual encirclement in painstaking, detail-obsessed small work. He first identified the most important political deals of his research years. Then – via several hundred questionnaires to the involved organizations – the most influential politicians, civil servants, and association representatives who influenced these deals. 1224 people were thus gathered. Those who appeared most frequently and held central positions made it to the next list: the 300 Most Powerful. Kriesi interviewed them with a team of assistants – confidential, for hours. Surprisingly, almost all – 256 – agreed to the endeavor. They revealed contacts and hidden possibilities of influence. On long lists, those political actors who considered themselves the most powerful were marked. The result: 40 percent of the powerful were representatives of freedom-thinkers – considerable, the FDP had a voter share of a good 20 percent back then. In contrast, the SP, elected by a quarter of the electorate at the time, represented only a sixth. Working-class children and Catholics were overrepresented, as were jurists and Protestants. Only 3 out of 300 were women. Business representatives had the most influence – above all those of the trade and industry association, the predecessor of today's Economiesuisse. The most important decisions were made in the associations – and not in parliament. The interviewees agreed on this. Even if they did not like to see themselves as part of an elite. "This is Switzerland: No one wants to be considered powerful. But they are," says Kriesi. The most explosive element was that ranking, which Kriesi wanted to imprint in his habilitation, page 442: the one with the 25 men who were consistently named as the most influential in the interviews. At number 1 was Paul Jolles, chief civil servant, head of the federal government's influential trade department and later director of the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs. Jolles was responsible for the Europe dossier and had led the negotiations for a free trade agreement with the European Community, the predecessor organization of the EU, in 1972. "He was at the top – at the same time, not even all the federal councilors made the list," says Kriesi. "That was quite irritating." So much so that Kriesi's supervisors at the University of Zurich forbade him from publishing the list. That is how he tells it today. Only when Jolles agreed to a compromise was the work accepted. The names were no longer sorted by influence, but discreetly Swiss: alphabetically. A Star in the Field – Unknown to the Public 45 years later. In Zurich, it is summer, and Hanspeter Kriesi is back. For one year, the most famous unknown of Swiss political science has lived in Zurich, the city to which he repeatedly came and repeatedly left during his career. He had moved there once to pursue a doctorate in sociology, instead of – as the family desired – becoming a wine merchant. Here he found himself in the trenches during the 1980s unrest when he wanted to investigate the movement of the "Moved," which ultimately broke into his office to steal his records. From here he left when he initially did not get a job after his investigation of the Swiss elites – first to the Netherlands, later to Geneva. He finally returned in 2002 as a professor, building Zurich political science on that booming field, which is today. Only to leave again ten years later because they did not want him to work beyond retirement. In Florence he became a professor again. And now he is back, as a pensioner. A master of his field, who does not particularly like to be called that. And yet, Kriesi has shaped not only his discipline but an entire generation of researchers and students. One of them, the political scientist Claude Longchamp, once said: "His lectures were like rock concerts. He had almost devout fans." To this day, Kriesi dominates the reading lists in the seminars of his field. With his empirical approaches, he led the discipline away from beautiful words and towards hard numbers. And thus shaped the way Swiss politics is researched here. Nevertheless, he is hardly known in the wider public. A television political scientist, a "public intellectual" – Kriesi never wanted to be that. "It is a dangerous position. Whoever wants to be that risks becoming a total chatterbox. One must give answers to questions where one as a scholar should actually say: 'I don't know, I have no numbers for that.'" It is a sentence that Kriesi himself often says. Another sentence that his former student Silja Häusermann remembers: "Science is 90 percent craft and 10 percent genius." Häusermann, now herself a professor, started working in her third semester for her later doctoral supervisor. For weeks she had to call craftsmen in the Canton of Valais who had not answered a questionnaire. As she did not come from a university family, Häusermann says. "I never thought I could become a professor. He showed me: research is something you can learn." The End of the Old Elite At the end of the 1980s, Kriesi finally formulated the thesis, based on detailed voter surveys, for which he remains famous in academic circles to this day. It is about the rise of right-wing populism – and what it means for the European party landscape. Kriesi's Prophecy: The old economic conflict between left and right – more market against more redistribution – will be replaced by a new one. A cultural struggle between right-wing populists and liberal-progressive parties, fought over the issues of migration, Europe, and national sovereignty. "That was a total minority opinion back then," says Häusermann. "Most researchers believed: 'The time of parties and divisions is over, everything tends towards the liberal center.' Switzerland was the ideal place to realize that this was a fallacy." In the 1990s, the SVP becomes the dominant political force. The Europe question divides the country. The economy stagnates, entire industries are liberalized. While Kriesi becomes the sought-after researcher again, the decay of that old elite, whose measurement once caused him so much trouble, begins. One of his students, the Geneva Pascal Sciarini, repeatedly re-examined Kriesi's elite study after the upheavals of the 1990s. The result, in Kriesi's words: "Something has collapsed that has never been found together again." Today, the political elite of Switzerland is much more fragmented and less homogeneous than fifty years ago. The time of "cronyocracy" with its backroom deals is over. "Parliament has gained influence. Associations can no longer impose themselves, even if they agree." This was not shown so clearly in recent years as in the debate about a framework agreement with the EU. There, employers and trade unions found a compromise, which the Federal Council also supported. But a majority in parliament did not find it. The breaking up of old power blocs, the dispute over the Europe question, and the rise of the SVP: all this is not an easy story of progress or regression for Kriesi, the old 68er. The elite he studied in the 1970s pushed the consensus very far. "They found solutions for pressing problems – pensions, the establishment of the unemployment fund. Everyone was under a blanket for that. Switzerland was led as if it were a company belonging to a few." Today it is different: "Swiss politics has become more polarized, but also more democratic – more is debated and decided in public," says Kriesi. "That is something good, even if it makes finding compromises more difficult." The Rise of the SVP as a Beacon Perhaps the most surprising thing in the conversations with Kriesi, this willful rationalist: he remained an optimist even after decades as a political observer. Kriesi, who once occupied a lecture hall as a student, is still politically left. He watches with concern how the SVP once made marginal conservative positions fashionable over the years. And yet, he does not want to agree with the lament of the impending end of democracy, which is currently in vogue in the Left. "In Western Europe, democracy is not in danger. And the SVP is not a danger to democracy," he says. Support for liberal fundamental rights and the principles of the rule of law remains strong both on the continent and in Switzerland. How does Kriesi arrive at this? "The numbers show it!" For his latest book, he has compiled survey data from all European countries. Everywhere the support for liberal democracy is large, the need for change is small. The same picture emerges from the Liberal Democracy Index from Sweden, which compiles thousands of expert opinions into an overall score. Whether it is free elections, the separation of powers, or minority rights: Europe consistently achieves constant values – while they eroded, for example, in the USA under Trump. "Even in the countries where the danger to democracy was greatest – Poland and Hungary – the voters ultimately pulled the lever," says Kriesi. He still believes in the common sense of ordinary citizens. In the fact that extremists, once in power, are disenchanted and integrated. The isolation of right-wing parties or their prohibition is therefore wrong. "A hundred years ago, everyone was against the Social Democrats. Today, everyone is against the radical right. This is the great conflict of our time. And it must be taken seriously. Whoever only says: 'These are enemies of democracy, with whom no discussion is to be had,' is not doing that." He spent a good part of his career measuring this new cultural struggle and its trigger issues – the ever harsher "us against them" regarding migration, asylum, Europe. He does not offer a solution, a way out of it, either, says Kriesi. But he is convinced that there must be one on a democratic path.