Leni Robert

Leni Robert (1991)

Leni Robert

Leni Robert-Bächtold (born March 6, 1936 ) is a Swiss politician ( FDP , Green Free List ), the first female member of the government of the Canton of Bern and the environmental movement in Switzerland.

Life

Leni Bächtold, daughter of the engineer and National Councilor Jakob Bächtold and the teacher Margrit nee Wechsler, completed primary school in Bern and Meiringen as well as the grammar school in Schaffhausen (Matura 1956). She then trained as a secretary and studied German, Slavic and journalism at the Universities of Zurich and Bern. Her marriage to the civil engineer Jean-Denis Robert (died 1968) had a son.

Leni Robert, from 1968 a member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), was one of the first politicians after the introduction of women's suffrage in the municipality of Bern in 1968 and in the canton of Bern in 1971. 1971–1976 she was a Bernese city councilor (legislature), 1977–1986 a major councilor . Her criticism of the police director of the city of Bern, the liberal Marco Albisetti, because of a police operation against demonstrators led to a break with her party in 1983, which she did not nominate for the national elections. Robert therefore resigned from the FDP and, with others like Rolf Deppeler, founded the ecologically oriented, left-wing bourgeois Free List . In 1983 she was elected to the National Council as their representative . Since the Swiss People's Party (SVP) and the FDP each ran their own list for the 1986 government council elections, Robert and her party colleague Benjamin Hofstetter managed to win two seats for the Free List (Green Parties) in the excited climate after the financial affair thus breaking the bourgeois majority for the first time in the history of the canton. Robert was the first female member of the Canton of Bern and the first Green member of the Swiss government; she subsequently resigned from the National Council. During her tenure as Director of Education, the school year was moved from spring to late summer with the long school year 1988–1989, the Scholarship Act, the revision of the University Act (both in 1989) and the introduction of the school model with six instead of four years of primary school and three instead of five years of upper school (1990). After the number of government members had been reduced from nine to seven as a result of an initiative from the right-wing bourgeois spectrum in 1989, Robert and Hofstetter were unable to defend their seats in the next elections in 1990, in which the FDP and SVP ran together again. In contrast, Robert took a seat in the National Council again from 1991–1995 and during this time was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and of the sub-commissions on the environment and population issues; In the meantime, she presided over the latter.

During her political career, Leni Robert campaigned at national and cantonal level in particular for environmental, equality and youth issues. From 1974 to 1986 she founded and presided over the association Bern stays green , from 1982 to 1986 she sat on the board of the women's headquarters in the canton of Bern, from 1984 to 1994 on the central board of Pro Natura and from 1991 to 2002 she presided over the Pestalozzi Children's Foundation . In 1984 she received the prize of the Swiss Association for Women's Rights . Her experiences as a young widow and single parent were particularly formative for her, at a time when there was a lack of support for such circumstances.

Web links

• Fabienne Amlinger: Leni Robert. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . June 12, 2019 .
• Leni Robert-Bächtold on the website of the Federal Assembly

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Erich Kobel: Almost the entire establishment was in the dock . In: Der Bund, Der Bund . August 15, 2014, ISSN  0774-6156 ( derbund.ch [accessed on January 11, 2018]).
2. ↑ Leni Robert-Bächtold on the website of the Canton of Bern, with "professional career" and "political work" ( Memento from December 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive )

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