Visions - Friends of the Constitution

For the long-term successful development of an organisation, experience and new ideas are needed. That is why Christina (Executive Board - development of regional groups) and Sandro (Executive Board and management of the office) are running again - together with Agnès (interim head of Romandie and regional head of Geneva) and further reinforcement of active regional group leaders as well as competent and experienced staff from German and French-speaking Switzerland.

For and with our association we want to...

• constructively shape policy and defend fundamental rights
• Strengthen the association base and network it even better
• Influence public opinion with high-quality communication work

Your Board

Our list includes 9 people who are standing for election and for Constitutional Friends as your new board:

Our advisory board

If the election is in favour of our list, we would be extremely happy to continue on the path of the Friends of the Constitution with the people of the previous advisory board. If we are elected, we will ask the previous advisory board about this.

In addition, the following people have already assured us of their support on the advisory board if we were elected:

• Dr. Dr. Timon Boehm (philosopher & physicist, from Maienfeld/GR)
• Heidi Mühlemann (pharmacist and freelance copywriter, retired since 2019, from Uetikon am See/ZH)
• Marion Russek (founding member and former board member FdV, 25 years entrepreneur, retired since 2020, from Steinhausen/ZG)

We believe that with the people from the previous advisory board, supplemented by Marion, Heidi and Timon, we have a broad-based team to accompany the Friends of the Constitution into the future.

A lot has happened since the idea on the Rütli. We founded the association "Friends of the Constitution", got off to a flying start and are now on a solid footing with around 26,000 members. We have learned a lot in the past months and gained valuable experience. We want to use this knowledge to continue shaping the future of our country. A mere return to the time "before Corona" is not an option for us. 

Many miraculous things have happened since 2020:

• Our consumer behaviour has changed. We have realised that we need much less than we thought. We can do without shopping trips, and we have compensated for the lack of restaurant visits with cosy get-togethers at home.
• Our social environment was turned upside down. Old friendships fell apart. Instead, we found many new friends with whom we can move and change many things. 
• Many of us have been politicised by the events. We will never tolerate foreign domination again. 
• We have rediscovered our own initiative and creativity and have outgrown ourselves. 
• We have learned to increasingly question what we are presented with as facts. Thinking for ourselves became our motto, and we are no longer giving that up.
• We have proven that we can achieve great things by joining forces. 

Strengthened by these new insights, we continue to campaign for an open, fair society in which all people have the same rights and in which a self-determined life and respect for fundamental rights are a matter of course.

In order to define the next goals of our association, we need a realistic analysis of the starting position.  We made an assessment of the "state of the nation" in the context of our team candidacy. We illuminated future social problem areas and drew from them what we considered to be a meaningful role for the Friends of the Constitution. We elaborate on the resulting goals in the Goals section.

An important vote at the end. Our team of 9, which we hope will soon be allowed to lead the fortunes of our association, sees itself as an "enabler" for the association members and the regional groups. On the one hand we ensure the administration and on the other hand we enable the decentralised implementation of the common goals. We want to use synergies and opportunities of our broad-based association for national actions, but also leave a lot of room for manoeuvre and decision-making competence in the regions.

We are your team!

Our foundation is the Charter and Mission Statement of the Friends of the Constitution.

Based on this, we have developed three thematic areas for defined our activities.

1. help shape policy

• We need an early warning system: It is important that we recognise early on when proposals for new laws are introduced in the commissions and parliaments. To this end, we would like to recruit a group of parliamentarians to monitor political activities for us. 
• We want to intervene directly democratically: We will continue to launch petitions, referendums and initiatives, organise political events and make our demands when it comes to our fundamental rights. This but without becoming a political party itself.
• Those responsible must be held accountable: We are committed to ensuring that the events surrounding the Corona "crisis" are fully investigated. We will also continue to support lawsuits by friendly organisations or take legal action ourselves if our constitutional rights are violated.  
• The sprawling surveillance state must be stopped: We oppose discriminatory certificates of any kind and participate in projects and political initiatives such as the 'cash initiative'. We want neither a national nor a global digital surveillance machine. 
• We are expanding our political influence: We support political organisations such as Aufrecht-Schweiz, which, like us, stand up for the observance of our fundamental rights. 

2. strengthen and network the association base

• Every member should be able to contribute: The regional groups are to be given more decision-making authority and - associated with this - also assume more responsibility. 
• We promote the exchange of information within the association: We are setting up an online system where every member can share their ideas and testimonials and quickly implement activities.  
• We are intensifying contacts with lawyers, economists, doctors, historians and philosophers: It is important that we can base our decisions on independent expertise.
• We intend to develop training and education for the regional leaders.
• We promote comprehensive networking: We motivate and support the regional groups to work more with local interest groups from the citizens' movement. This concerns in particular the areas of schools and education, economy, medicine, law as well as culture and sports.

3. develop a publicity effect / influence public opinion

• We want to have our say in the leading media and will supply them with press releases and letters to the editor.

• We also go public with our own contributions, commentaries, news and interviews. 

• We promote and support high-quality, investigative journalism.

The conditions under which political decisions are made have changed greatly in recent years. The established political landscape hardly reflects this development. At the latest with the "Corona" event, for example, the distinction between "left" and "right" became obsolete. The contours between private/public, national/international are becoming increasingly blurred. The separation between the legislative/executive/judicial branches, which is essential for a democracy, is hardly recognisable in many cases. In many countries, the population experienced how the executive proclaimed a permanent state of emergency under the pretext of "Corona" and practically over night disempowered the legislative and judicial power. The media, as the so-called fourth power in the state, rushed to the aid of the governments, not only by reporting completely uncritically, but also by categorically ignoring opposing opinions and defaming their representatives with baseless accusations. 

This synchronisation of opinions is an extremely worrying development. Politics, science and the economy should act according to their own guidelines and independently of each other. But this division of competences was undermined by the "Corona" event. Politics, science and business not only entered into cooperative ventures, but united in actual complicity. For their "decisions", the politicians picked out those scientists whose "truth" fitted into their picture, and they provided the economy with a secure purchase market for a product ("vaccine") that would otherwise never have received approval.

Of course, this complicity had been emerging for a long time in the course of globalisation, driven by organisations such as the WEF and the WHO. They praised the cooperation of politics, science and business as profitable and sold it to the world as inevitable. The darker side of the coin became abundantly clear with "Corona" at the latest. This disastrous cooperation is indeed profitable, namely for individual corporations, and something was also sold, namely our fundamental rights of freedom. 

These institutional developments are accompanied by technological developments, first and foremost the Digitisation. Here, too, there is a shadow side that has received little attention so far: the pressure to conform that this creates. All processes in the digital world run according to uniform patterns. Goods and services are available according to the same schemes at the push of a button. Everything is comparable with everything else at all times. In addition, digitalisation is fuelling a development that makes it possible to record all areas of life statistically and biologically and thus to be able to control them. 

Society was manipulated with mass psychological means under the pretext of "Corona". Elements such as propaganda, censorship, moralising, division, exclusions, scapegoating or hate speech have not only hindered free, rational dialogue, but in many places made it impossible. As a result, the collective consciousness has now shifted to such an extent that measures that would have been considered unacceptable a short time ago have successively become a frightening normality.

From a historical-philosophical perspective, structural similarities with dark eras of contemporary history can be identified. In her analysis "Elements and Origins of Total Rule", Hannah Arendt names the levelling of as many existing meaning-giving structures as possible as the necessary precondition for producing a homogeneous, arbitrarily mouldable and available "mass": "The specific selflessness of mass man appeared here as an addiction to anonymity, to pure functioning, to blending into a so-called greater whole - in other words, to any transformation that might help to erase one's own inauthentic identity with certain roles and prescribed functions in society." (p. 707f.)

Arendt's observation on the dissolution of the working class under Stalin is also striking (keyword: vaccination card). This process "had reached its end in 1938, when the introduction of the work book, without which no worker could work or travel or obtain food in Russia and in which all the details of his occupation were recorded, transformed the entire working class into a gigantic forced labour force, from which all freedoms had been collectively withdrawn." (Elements and Origins of Total Rule, p. 691)

The parallels to today are frightening. Influential supranational organisations use their power with threatening consistency, governments hardly act in the interest of the population any more. 

More than ever, determined civil society engagement is needed to uphold fundamental and human rights. There is much to do!

Unsurprisingly, further "crises" are already looming on the political horizon: climate, scarcity of resources, cyber attacks, collapse of the financial markets, further "pandemics". 

Corona" showed us which instruments for "crisis management" we can expect in the future: Lockdowns, curfews, bans on demonstrations, contact tracing, access regulations via certificates - all means with which crowds are controlled and which, at least for Western democracies, are new or have been tested for the first time on a global scale. Despite individual "special paths", the uniformity is remarkable. The fact that this is being done in the name of a "good", in this case ostensibly health, should not reassure us, but on the contrary should put us on high alert. Every totalitarian regime from the far left to the far right has invoked some "good" in its time. 

Thus, should the "Corona" event become the paradigm, the focus will no longer be on targeted crisis management (such as expanding hospital capacities). Instead, the temptation is great to impose a general state of emergency, which will be prolonged again and again under changing pretexts and finally become the normal state. The rights of individuals guaranteed in the constitution are thus unhinged. This is particularly objectionable when the arguments put forward are not comprehensible. Be it because the danger situation can be assessed differently with well-founded arguments, or be it because information about it is selected or even manipulated.  

This was also clearly evident in the course of "Corona": the strong tendency towards cancel culture. Voices that do not conform to the government's narrative have been and continue to be excluded by the mass media with frightening uniformity. Yet the very "criteria" that supposedly justify such exclusion should be discussed comprehensively and with the inclusion of all perspectives.

The high point of this development so far is the censorship of vaccine-sceptic contributions on Youtube and other large platforms. Who is afraid of what here and why? What is not to be brought to the table? Scepticism is not an anti-scientific attitude, but a prerequisite for a science worthy of the name. It is particularly noteworthy that dogmatic attitudes, up to and including advocacy of the use of batons and coercive detention, come primarily from circles that used to see themselves in the role of the minority and opposition to the state. 

If we want to counter all these highly problematic developments, we need social support and sustainable communities of like-minded people! 

The Friends of the Constitution are a force to be taken seriously in Swiss political life. They launch and support petitions, referendums and campaigns. The Covid law, the anti-terror law (PMT), the initiative "Stop compulsory vaccination", the referendum on the "media law", the referendum on the "contradiction solution for organ donations", the "cash initiative" show the direction in which our country is currently heading. The population is increasingly being patronised and monitored.

We Friends of the Constitution focus our attention on the obvious complicity between politics, business and the media and expose the usurpation of power by elites that are in no way democratically legitimised. We need an antithesis to the world view of the powerful who want to deprive people of their right to exist as empathetic, self-determined and social individual beings and see them merely as biological mass beings. We do not need utopian "resets", blanket medical assaults and elitist control fantasies.

We want a return to what makes states stable and strong: a society of independent and sovereign individuals with a liberal and democratic constitution. The Friends of the Constitution are the new force working for this and consistently standing up for the observance of fundamental constitutional rights.