Politics
The "Stadtrat", the local executive council, has 7 members, elected by the citizens of Winterthur every four years. In the 2010-2014 Stadtrat, there are three Social Democratic Party (SP) members, two from the FDP, and one each from the Greens and the EVP. A coalition of SP and Greens has the majority in this session.
The legislative, "Grosser Gemeinderat" (large community council), has sixty members. In the 2010 elections, eleven parties made it into the council, with the SP (16 seats) and SVP (13 seats) forming the two largest groups.
In the 2007 federal election the most popular party was the SVP which received 27.7% of the vote. The next two most popular parties were the SP (23.2%) and the Green Party (14.4%).
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Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“I have come to the conclusion that the closer people are to what may be called the front lines of government ... the easier it is to see the immediate underbrush, the individual tree trunks of the moment, and to forget the nobility the usefulness and the wide extent of the forest itself.... They forget that politics after all is only an instrument through which to achieve Government.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)