Love Quote by Peter Bichsel

Bichsel aims his blade at Switzerland's favorite self-myth: that direct democracy is not just a system but a moral identity. By inventing the figure of "that Swiss in the heart", he sketches a type, not a passport. It's the citizen who performs civic virtue while secretly craving the comforts of hierarchy. The provocation works because it flips the national brand. Instead of Switzerland as the calm antidote to strongmen, Bichsel suggests the appetite for authority is not a foreign contagion; it's domestic, polite, and often subconscious.

The line is intentionally clumsy in its English cadence, which mirrors the bluntness of the thought: the desire for a king is not rational policy preference but emotional nostalgia, a longing for someone to decide. The "or at least a strong Upper House" is the killer aside. If a monarch sounds embarrassing, the same impulse can be laundered through respectable institutions. Bichsel understands how authoritarian desire rarely announces itself with boots; it arrives as "stability", "adult supervision", "a check on the mob."

Context matters: postwar Switzerland sold itself as a neutral, consensus-driven exception, while simultaneously guarding exclusionary instincts (about outsiders, dissenters, even cultural difference) behind procedure. Bichsel, a writer tied to the critical Swiss left and suspicious of complacency, punctures the idea that more ballots automatically mean more freedom. His real target is not democracy but the way democracies can become rituals that soothe rather than challenge power - and how easily citizens can ask for less say in exchange for less anxiety.