Does anybody know enougth about the Swiss and German system that can explain to me why we never here the term "coalition" in swiss politics? If you are in the parlament you are in it. I mean there is stuff to vote on and everybody votes for what he likes what effects does not been in "the coalition" have?
You probably don't hear it because Switzerland has a pretty much perpetual coalition:
Since 1959 the four main parties has effectively voluntarily split the federal council between them based on parliamentary representation to rather than risk being left outside government for any length of time.
The distribution of seats follows a formula agreed by those parties, so it's not "news" that the council keeps pretty much the same party composition election after election.
Most other countries don't have any long standing arrangements like that, so the question of who will form the government is always a major subject in advance of elections.
Ah the Idea would be to get a colision that is more than half the gov and then putting in all the seven head ministers only from parties in the colision. Now I see, that didn't even occur to me that one could do that but in hinsite its pretty clever. In Switzerland this almost equal distribution of the 7 head ministers was just called "Zauberformel" witch just means "Magicformula", now I understand why the called it that.
Well it has been broken anyway, the right wing basiclly kicked out both of there ministers witch led to the split of that party. The biggest party ended up with no seat in the Bundesrat (Top 7). Now they have one again but he has the militäry and nobody cares about that :)
It seems to be in large part traditional that German parties have formed formal coalitions to support governments - in the Swiss parliament you have "Fraktionen", which can have members from several parties, but are not as formally organized (German coalition governments are usually based on a written contract).
Another big factor seems to be that the German Bundeskanzler has the sole power to decide policy and choose his ministers, so having parties form a solid majority to elect and support him is very important. In Switzerland, the government consists of the seven Bundesräte, who are peers and elected independently by the parliament. They rotate at being the Bundespräsident (formal head of government), who does not have special powers.
According to the German Wikipedia, this is completely wrong - they rotate every year, and the office is given to the one who hasn't been President for the longest time (or ever).
This is, however, purely a custom; formally, the Bundespräsident is elected.
I hope I made myself clear.