Pierre Aeby (politician, 1950)

Pierre Aeby

Pierre Aeby (born February 14, 1950 in Bern ) is a Swiss politician and State Councilor of the canton of Friborg .

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The Catholic comes from Düdingen , his parents are the diplomat Alphonse Aeby and Marie-Rose nee. Gassmann. He is married to Monica Buetti from Ticino. The couple have two children.

Immediately after his birth, his mother went with him to her husband Alphonse, who had already left on an official mission to the Swiss consulate in Algiers a month earlier , where the Aeby family lived until the events of the Algerian War in 1956. As a result of the Algerian War, she was transferred to the consulate in Manchester , where she stayed until 1961. They then lived in Jakarta , but without Pierre, who lived in a boarding school in Broc and attended the St. Michael College in Freiburg, where he passed his Matura in 1970 .

With a legal license from the University of Friborg in his pocket, the young lawyer worked for the Swiss Federal Tax Administration in Bern and became a VAT specialist. In the late 1970s he traveled through Switzerland as an ambassador for Chevallaz's projects to introduce VAT (1977, 1979), both of which the people rejected. From 1978 to 1981 he was a member of the local council of Fétigny and directed the fortunes of the local football club, which played in the first division .

In 1981 he won the elections for chief bailiff of the Broye district by 176 votes ahead of Charles Pilloud (CVP) and five years later he was confirmed in office. He was the first social democratic senior bailiff in the history of the canton of Friborg. During his two terms of office, he laid the first informal foundations for intercantonal projects in the medical-social field and for secondary education.

In 1991, Pierre Aeby was elected to the State Council and took over the building, civil protection and environmental protection department. In 1996 he waived re-election because he had been a member of the Council of States since the end of 1995 and the two offices could no longer be combined. During his last year in the State Council, he was its Vice-President.

In the building department, Pierre Aeby led an important revision of the spatial planning and building law, which in particular provided for the simplification and acceleration of the procedures. The Road Act was revised in order to clarify the cost allocation for the construction and maintenance of the road network between the canton and the municipalities as laid down in a structure plan. In 1994 the canton entered into an inter-cantonal agreement on public procurement. On Aeby's initiative, a new law on waste management was passed in 1996, which for the first time in Switzerland provided for balanced financing of waste disposal and was based on three almost equal pillars: general tax fund, household fee and bag fee. A plan for air pollution control measures was adopted in 1992. Numerous road loans were presented to the Grand Council, including the one for the renewal of the Pérolles Bridge (approved by the people in 1992). Pierre Aeby successfully campaigned for the state to take over the dossier of the Poya Bridge from the city; he launched the first realization studies for this artificial structure. At the same time, the first preliminary studies for a bypass road of the Bulle agglomeration were carried out. These dossiers also occupied his successors.

During this period of economic crisis, he kept a minimal investment volume to secure jobs and, with the help of road maintenance loans, made it possible to employ displaced unemployed people in order to promote their reintegration. The civil engineering department of the canton of Friborg was the second office in Switzerland to receive ISO 9001 certification. During his tenure, Pierre Aeby endeavored to adhere to the principles of harmonious spatial planning and environmental protection. However, the Grand Council rejected a draft to subject all gravel pits in the canton to the same order as the water (licensed public property) on the grounds that this would be tantamount to "nationalizing" the gravel pits. Aeby vigorously represented the Council of State in the Conseil du Léman (Geneva, Vaud, Wallis, Ain, Haute-Savoie) to underline Freiburg's desire to move closer to its French and Lemanic neighbors after the people rejected the EEA at the end of 1992.

At the federal level, Pierre Aeby ran for the National Council in 1987 and found himself right behind the previous Cyrill Brügger . In 1995 he was elected to the Council of States in the second ballot against the liberal Monique Pichonnaz, but had to give way in 1999 to the new CVP - FDP alliance with Anton Cottier and Jean-Claude Cornu .

Pierre Aeby is a member of numerous commissions - management, transport and telecommunications, political institutions and legal issues - as well as the delegation to the Assemblée parlementaire de la francophonie and the one responsible for the supervision of the new Alpine railway line (NEAT). From 2000 to 2001 he took part in the drafting of the new Freiburg constitution as a representative of the city of Freiburg in the Constitutional Council. From 1994 to 1999 he was a member of the management and then Vice President of SP Switzerland ; After the resignation of Ursula Koch as party president and national councilor, he took over the party presidency on an interim basis.

From 1996 to 2005 he was secretary of Pro Senectute Switzerland in western Switzerland and in 2007 he became a member of the Swiss Board of Trustees in Zurich. Since 2006 he has been Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Freiburg Hospital Network and a member of the Board of Directors of the Broye intercantonal hospital. He is also director of the «Les Fauvettes» nursing home in Montagny-la-Ville and President of the Board of Trustees of the Théâtre des Osses, Center dramatique fribourgeois, in Givisiez.

literature

• Georges Andrey , Hubertus von Gemmingen (translation): The Freiburg State Council: 1848–2011; History, organization, members . Ed .: John Clerc, Jean-Pierre Dorand, Nicholas Gex. Paulus, Freiburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-7228-0815-4 .

Web links

• Pierre Aeby on the website of the Federal Assembly