Arena about SVP without SVP representative

 Friday evening's Arena on the subject of the SVP split will take place without the participation of the party concerned. The SVP had insisted that Ueli Maurer should appear instead of party president Toni Brunner, and Swiss television had insisted until the last minute that the SVP president should take part in the program, the SVP announced on Friday. In the opinion of the SVP, however, it would not have been Brunner but Maurer, as the party president of many years' standing, who would have been best suited to represent the party in the arena. By excluding Maurer, Swiss television was obviously pursuing the goal of marginalizing and denigrating the SVP. For its part, Schweizer Fernsehen points out that the Arena editorial team wanted to invite one of the representatives of the SVP leadership. However, both Toni Brunner and the vice presidents Adrian Amstutz and Christoph Blocher declined to take part.
The editorial team rejected the SVP General Secretariat's decision to send Ueli Maurer to the Arena. Marianne Gilgen, head of the editorial team, explained the decision by saying that they wanted to hold a forward-looking discussion. The issues under discussion should therefore be decided by the new party leadership, not by Maurer.