Has the cantonal director of finance lost touch with locals

Last year the people of Zug rejected a proposal to build an CHF 800-million City tunnel project.
 
Last week the people of Zug rejected the introduction of measures to curb spending to the tune of CHF 40 million.
 
As the cantonal director of planning at the time the City Tunnel was rejected, and cantonal director of finance who urged locals to vote for the package of measures last week, the question has been raised if Heinz Tännler has lost touch with the electorate.
 
What needs to be remembered, of course, is that, in a country like Switzerland, political institutions have enjoyed uninterrupted development for centuries; it is always the office which is more important than its incumbent, so the influence of any one person needs to be kept in proportion. As for the suggestion Tännler may be losing touch with the people of Zug, Andreas Hostettler, the leader of the cantonal FDP party, said that he (Tännler) always had his finger on the pulse of how locals felt politically.
 
Following these two major defeats, however, a journalist of the Zuger Zeitung asked a number of other leading politicians if they felt Tännler, who is also the head of the cantonal government, was losing his touch.
 
For his part, Andreas Lustenberger, the leader of the cantonal Alternative Green party, said the blame for two failed referenda could not be simply put down to Tännler alone. He did feel, however, that Tännler made the mistake of talking about the necessity of imposing cutbacks some six months before the referendum on the multi-million-Swiss-franc City Tunnel, while acknowledging that the then director of planning was never one to shrink from building major road projects.
 
On this point, one only has to think of the Northern Access (Nordzufahrt) road, built under Tännler’s supervision, which has helped alleviate congestion considerably; in fact the journalist who wrote this article jokingly suggested it might even have been called Tännler Drive. Lustenberger went on to say he felt the conservative people of Zug baulked at huge projects, such as the City Tunnel. “Perhaps others just did not want to see Tännler get his way in this matter,” he added.
 
Pirmin Frei, the leader of the Cantonal CVP party agreed in part with Lustenberger. “Tännler is a doer,” he said, as he added it was a great achievement that he (Tännler) managed to get to the stage of having referenda on the tunnel project and the cutback proposals. Frei went on to say that locals had been weighing up the pros and cons of a tunnel for years, with many people having an opinion on the matter, whereas the cutback measures did not engage locals so much, if the fewer people who attended meetings about it was anything to go by. “Tännler did not manage to persuade locals with regard to the cutbacks, because with some 40 separate measures, it was too complex an issue,” he said, adding that he felt that, while Tännler was able to convince parliamentarians of his case, this was not so with the public at large.
 
Not unexpectedly, Tännler got much support from his SVP-party colleague, Thomas Aeschi, who represents Zug in Bern. “The cantonal director of finance has not suffered any loss of image whatsoever,” he insisted. “One cannot just attribute the outcome of any one referendum to one politician. Responsibility lies with the entire cantonal government and parliament. It is their job to think these projects through and to present them to the public in a way they think fit. If the electorate then goes on to reject the proposals, then it is an indication that the executive has distanced itself too far from the people.” He, too, praised Tännler for being instrumental in having a referendum at all on the City Tunnel. As to the rejection last week of the package of cutbacks, Aeschi thought that it presented the left-wing parties with too much ammunition to attack it.
 
Speaking in her role as the leader of the cantonal SP party, Barbara Gysel acknowledged, too, that, of course, Tännler was not omnipotent, with a good democracy there to ensure no one individual politician has too much power. She recognised the great effort Tännler put into both projects and was sure that the rejection of the City Tunnel project hurt him greatly, bearing in mind “it was his baby”.   What she was sure about was that loftiness did not go down well with the people. “They know what we can afford and what not,” she insisted. “What is undeniable is that, in these two major referenda, David has defeated Goliath,” and concluded by saying she hoped for “constructive tax increases in some areas”.
 
Returning to the reaction of Andreas Hostettler, he said that, had Tännler been able to decide himself which of the 40 aspects of the package of cutbacks to include and which to not to, he would have left out the ones relating to savings in social welfare. Nevertheless, he felt that Tännler’s image had been dented somewhat.
 
And was does the director of finance himself have to say about all this?  He said that, with regard to the City Tunnel, the matter had been discussed for some 40 years, but he was the first ever director of planning to have succeeded in bringing the issue to a referendum. He felt that for many years, too little had been invested in the canton’s road infrastructure, with major projects far more difficult to push through these days, not least because of the length of time political processes take before final realisation.
 
As to the proposed package of cutbacks, as reported last week, the cantonal director of finance said on hearing the result that he would be analysing carefully why these were rejected. While admitting it would be a challenge to ensure the canton would be able to balance its books by 2020, he remained determined to do so.