Swiss women had counted on Hillary win

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (right) meets Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey (left) in Washington DC, July 2009 Keystone

Donald Trump has made it to the White House. This is likely to surprise many prominent Swiss female politicians, who had been looking forward to Hillary Clinton being the first female president of the United States.

Switzerland has had female presidents since 1999. But it is an honorary, rotating position among the cabinet, so a very different job to that of US president.

One of the country’s former presidents – Micheline Calmy-Rey, who held the post in 2007 and 2011 – was foreign minister when Clinton was Secretary of State, in charge of foreign affairs. They first met in 2009.

“We were not friends. Each of us defended our own country’s interests,” Calmy-Rey said in an interview with the NZZ am Sonntag External linknewspaper, published on the Sunday ahead of the election. But they did enjoy a certain “tacit agreement”, she said.

They worked on the UBS bank data affair and telephoned each other often in the years that followed, including, memorably for Calmy-Rey, while she was at the hairdresser’s. For Calmy-Rey the two women shared common values of human rights, dialogue, multilateralism and promotion of women. Clinton gave Switzerland continuity and would be “a president that we already know well,” added Calmy-Rey.

Demanding and important

Elisabeth Kopp, Switzerland’s very first female cabinet member, in 1984, reflected on the job of US president, which is “without doubt the most demanding and important in the western world,” as she told the tabloid BlickExternal link ahead of the vote. Women often have different priorities than going after this job, she said. This is why it had taken 96 years after women received the vote in the US for there to be a female presidential candidate, she explained.

Many woman were hoping for a Clinton win as a further step towards equality, Kopp said in comments made on Monday.

Alliance F, the association of Swiss women’s organisations, said that having a woman in the most powerful job in the world would make young women dream that they could do it too. If Clinton were to win, it would help show that politics, power and being the boss were not just male domains, Maya Graf, the organisation’s co-president and herself a Green party parliamentarian, told the Aargauer Zeitung newspaper on November 3.External link

However, the whole article noted that even if Clinton were to win, not everyone would be happy about it. Her lack of charisma, the whiff of scandal around her emails and health concerns all combined to make her “no popstar”, even for European women. And these issues had overshadowed the potential “historical moment”.