Online reports – Politics – Searching for traces of a green hope

© Photo by Peter Knechtli, OnlineReports.ch

“I am not Don Quixote”: Green Party official defender Reber, Café-Bar

Isaac Reber: Security Director of Basel-Landschaft for four years – how much Green has he forced into politics?

From Peter Knechtli

The Green Party's Basel-Landschaft security director Isaac Reber is running for a second term. He is a professional optimist, laughs a lot – and is once again entering the election campaign without a party alliance. But he is not revealing his cards. Where he stands politically and what he has achieved in government has not yet been made clear enough to the public.

When the epicurean Isaac Reber (53) boards the SBB first class carriage in Sissach shortly after seven in the morning to travel to his workplace in the government building of the canton's capital, he looks forward to the first stop after a “Camel”: an espresso with pear juice awaits him in the small café-bar “L'Angelo Dolce” directly on platform 1 in Liestal station. “The best coffee in Europe,” he says half-seriously and concludes his assessment with a brief fit of laughter.

The ever-friendly gentleman behind the bar (“buon giorno”) has of course noticed that a high-ranking politician, the President of the Basel-Landschaft government, has become a regular here. So he was easily persuaded to allow Isaac Reber to stick his election poster (“Vote Easy”) on the window of the pastry shop right on the platform shortly before the turn of the year – clearly visible to the stream of commuters passing by. There is no better private placement at the station.

Reber's surprise coup

With his posters, the “offensive Green” (as Reber called it in 2006) had already attracted attention and caused a stir four years ago when he first ran for government council. Long before all other candidates, he single-handedly flooded the Basel region with his election posters (“Connecting the economy and the environment”) and thus secured exclusive presence along the streets of Basel for weeks. This clever move may have influenced the successful election result: Reber entered the cantonal government before the incumbent FDP finance director Adrian Ballmer and caused the SVP construction director Jörg Krähenbühl to be voted out of office, something no one expected.

The Greens and Reber's voters were jubilant: Finally, things were going well in Basel-Landschaft. The trained ETH geographer and spatial planner had come forward as a beacon of hope for all those who were worried that Basel-Landschaft, once considered a pioneer, was relegating to the lower leagues of ecologically committed cantons. The Green would have been the perfect fit to take over the construction and environmental protection department, which had until then been run by the SVP.

But things turned out differently. The bourgeois government majority and its strategic leaders motivated the liberal security director Sabine Pegoraro to move to the Ministry of the Environment, so that the novice Reber had to make do with her chair as head of police and justice. He was not able to put a green stamp on Baselbieter politics, at best a grey one. Because his dossiers are now called “police”, “guardianship authority”, “public prosecutor's office” or “reorganization”.

Security Director for Joy

But “Easy”, as friends and many people call him, has no problem with this – quite the opposite: he feels supported by his staff. “I was happy to be security director for four years and will be happy to remain security director for another four years,” he admits in an interview with OnlineReports. Sitting at the round white table in his corner office in the government building, he shows himself to be an official who is obviously comfortable with the administration of the police and justice system. His sentences are like a series of credos, proof of success and self-affirming internal views.

“I really enjoy working in the department,” says the boss of 1,050 civil servants, half of whom are police officers. “There is a good management culture and I give my people the freedom they need to be creative.” He stresses that his department “has 70 fewer people than when I took office.” This is not just his own achievement, but above all the result of the previously agreed reorganization of the public prosecutor's office, district clerk's offices and guardianship.

“The drawing is wrong”

We would like to know where Isaac Reber is politically positioned four years after being inaugurated. Then comes an answer that sounds like a consultant's advice to give the media too little profile rather than too much: “I definitely have green roots. I am an open, optimistic person who likes to look forward. I don't think much of box thinking” and ideologies because they don't do justice to people. We would like to know whether Reber's Green Party links or to the right of the SP, and draw an axis. “The drawing is wrong,” says Reber, and sketches the Greens as a house with a broad roof (“from left-green to the liberal wing”) under the SP.

When asked what specific ecological impulses the father of two grown-up daughters had brought to the five-member executive, he offered another code: “I see the government as a team. It is not appropriate to make a big deal about our own achievements. Most of what we do is a collective effort.” As an example of such joint work, he cites the fact that for the last two years the canton has only used electricity from renewable sources, “which costs a little more but is compensated for by this.” Reber is convinced that something like this “would not have been decided in the composition of the old government.” He is not opposed to further road construction “where it makes sense”: “The Allschwil feeder road and the Pfeffingerring are needed.”

Turmoil surrounding Arslan and Wiedemann

Far more important to him than the implementation of individual ecological concerns is a state that is managed sustainably in financial and economic terms and uses its resources efficiently. “That can also mean saving. But tax increases are not necessary at the moment.” His contribution was that the economy was “given a higher priority,” placed under the government and declared a legislative priority. One of the consequences is that since then the entire government – and not just the economics director as before – has been making “almost monthly visits to companies.” Reber cites the Dreispitz area with the “transit warehouse” project and the relocation of the Ruchfeld stop, the progressive energy law and the investment projects of Coop and Jaquet in Pratten as further impulses for sustainability.

While things have been mostly quiet for Security Director Reber over the past four years, he was hit by a bit of a political storm with the election of Sibel Arslan as head of the penal and correctional services and her debt collection problem. When Reber called off the election and offered the already elected candidate a position in the general secretariat as a replacement, the responses were divided. On Facebook, one person ranted heartily that he wanted Reber to be voted out (“and I say that as a Green”), while others accused him of electoral opportunism. But Reber probably also scored points with the population with his quick withdrawal, his apology and the admission of a “misjudgment”. Reber to OnlineReports: “I am not Don Quixote.”

“Easy” Reber commented defensively on the fact that his party enemy Jürg Wiedemann is the head of a committee in favor of the liberal government candidate Monica Gschwind and for the exclusion of the SP from the executive: “Wiedemann has made a clear statement, nothing more and nothing less. The Greens do not support the campaign. But we do not know of any ban on speaking.

Charm offensive among middle-class voters

Will the committee, which aims to increase the power of the bourgeoisie, come at a time when he will find it more convenient? Reber: “I don't think that has much to do with me.” Perhaps it does. The Social Democrats, who helped Reber get elected four years ago, are angry. “The Basel-Landschaft center-left coalition has been shaky since 2011,” says SP National Councilor Eric Nussbaumer. Although the Reber committee also includes SP members, he is likely to lose votes from his comrades, which he will have to make up for in the bourgeois camp and therefore gain sympathy there.

Thanks to his non-partisan nature, Isaac Reber sees the political climate differently – namely in such a way that he does not have to fear for his re-election. He was elected district president with 77 out of 82 votes and by all district council factions.

The fact that he is elected by people from all parties was already noticeable when he was elected to the Sissach municipal council as a “Stächpalme” candidate. As a person with a “strong sense of justice,” he is also eligible for election by the left. He also believes that the SP must be represented in the government and that dual representation of the FDP is not justified. The current government, with one member each from the SVP, FDP, SVP, SP and Greens, “best reflects the current balance of power,” Reber believed, and claimed: “My credo is efficiency and proximity to the people.”

Reber wants to demonstrate his proximity to the citizens and convey a sense of security by combating burglary through increased traffic and identity checks and a doubling of arrests in the last two years. In order to get a feel for the problems, he regularly goes to his people on the front lines – with the search team, with patrols, at football matches, with the youth service on playgrounds. He draws conclusions from this and, for example, provides equipment for better mobile data access for the police front lines. Or, together with Basel-Stadt, he opens a passport counter on the Novartis campus or a branch of the motor vehicle inspection in the testing station in both Basel.

Governing with a long-term horizon

Reber no longer sees himself as an “offensive Green” but as an inspiring member of an overall authority. “Since the summer of 2013, a majority of the government has been acting with a long-term horizon.” This has made it possible to implement a “consistent hospital policy” as the Greens had long been calling for. Bad investments such as the double-digit million sum that was wasted on planning a new hospital on the Bruderholz should be a thing of the past thanks to “sustainable investments”.

But the current Sissach Chess Club champion is not revealing his cards if he is re-elected on February 8. When asked whether he is considering a move to the Construction and Environmental Protection Directorate, he blocks it (“I do not offer any support for that”), only to then reveal a tiny insight into his strategy: “If the directorate becomes vacant in four years, I will consider it – but with an open outcome.

January 2, 2015

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