The defeat in the vote on the AHV reform for Mattea Meyer (35) and Cédric Wermuth (36) was “surprisingly close”, but “painful”, the SP leadership duo looks back on the political year in their Christmas podcast. “You won nothing by it – except an ideological victory for the political right,” Wermuth laments.
won nothing? It doesn’t look that bad for the SP after all: because the AHV defeat gave the SP a boost in membership. “In the days following the AHV vote, we were able to record an above-average number of entries,” party spokesperson Nicolas Häsler told Blick. “On voting Sunday alone and the two days after that, we had 200 newcomers.” In September there were about 400.
“The majority of these newcomers are women,” says Häsler. Not without reason: in the AHV vote, the women were outvoted by the men and sentenced to work longer. This has upset many women.
SP now has more than 33,000 members
Thanks to the AHV boost, the SP has now also broken through the 33,000 member mark. At the end of November, the party had exactly 33,407 registered comrades.
Although the Social Democrats are currently on the decline in the elections, their membership has been rising for some time. Since Meyer and Wermuth took office in October 2020, about 2000 people have been added.
“Since 2015, the SP Switzerland has been registering a continuous increase in membership after we – like all other parties – had lost members since the mid-1990s,” explains Häsler. The joy is all the greater, “because compared to some other parties there are real members who pay dues and are active in their section”.