Elisabeth Kopp, Switzerland’s first female cabinet minister, dies at 86

Elisabeth Kopp, here in 2018, was the first woman to hold a government ministerial post in Switzerland. She died on April 7 aged 86. © Keystone / Urs Flueeler

Elisabeth Kopp, the first woman to be a member of the Swiss cabinet, has died at 86, the government announced on Friday. She died on April 7 after a long illness.

Kopp, a member of the centre-right Radical-Liberal Party, was elected to the Federal Council, Switzerland’s seven-person government, in October 1984. The election was a milestone for the equality of women in Switzerland, the government wroteExternal link. Thirteen years after women got the vote in Switzerland, it was the first time a woman had been elected to the federal government.

However, her political career took a dramatic turn in autumn 1988 when she found herself at the centre of one of Switzerland’s biggest political scandals after a telephone call she made. Following allegations that she had tipped off her businessman husband about federal investigations into a company with which he was connected, she was forced to resign on January 12, 1989.

In November 1989 a parliamentary commission of enquiry criticised her for having breached rules on official secrecy and said her resignation was inevitable. The Federal Court later cleared her of the charges.

After her resignation, Kopp largely withdrew from the public eye at first, but then began to speak out from time to time on issues close to her heart. In 2004 she supported the introduction of maternity insurance. Equality for women, whom she encouraged to become involved in politics, remained dear to her heart and she defended it at conferences and discussions until the last years of her life.

The government said it had learnt of her death with great sadness and offered its sincere condolences to her family.

Politicians and women’s groups paid tribute after the announcement. “She was a pioneer for women in politics,” tweeted Justice Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, one of three women currently in the seven-member Swiss government. Radical-Liberal Party president Thierry Burkart hailed her as a “charismatic politician and a pioneer of equality between men and women”.