Federal Assembly (Switzerland)

The Federal Assembly,^[1] is the federal bicameral parliament,^[2] of Switzerland. It comprises the 200-seat National Council and the 46-seat Council of States. It meets in Bern in the Federal Palace.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (August 2021) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 6,207 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Assemblée fédérale (Suisse)]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Assemblée fédérale (Suisse)}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Quick Facts Type, Houses ...

Federal Assembly Bundesversammlung (German) Assemblée fédérale (French) Assemblea federale (Italian) Assamblea federala (Romansh)
Type
Type	Bicameral
Houses	Council of States National Council
Leadership
President of the National Council	Eric Nussbaumer, SP/PS
President of the Council of States	Eva Herzog, SP/PS
Structure
Seats	246 46 Council of States 200 National Council
National Council political groups	SVP/UDC 62   SP/PS 41   The Centre 29   FDP/PLR 28   Greens 23   GLP/PVL 10   EvP/PEV 2   EDU/UDF 2   MCG 2   LT 1
Council of States political groups	The Centre 15   FDP/PLR 11   SP/PS 9   SVP/UDC 6   Greens 3   GLP/PVL 1   MCG 1
Elections
Last National Council election	22 October 2023
Last Council of States election	October-November 2023
Meeting place
Federal Palace of Switzerland, Bern
Website
www.parliament.ch

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The houses have identical powers. Members of both houses represent the cantons, but, whereas seats in the National Council are distributed in proportion to population, each canton has two seats in the Council of States, except the six 'half-cantons', which have one seat each. Both are elected in full once every four years, with the last election being held in 2023.

The Federal Assembly possesses the federal government's legislative power, along with the separate constitutional right of citizen's initiative. For a law to pass, it must be passed by both houses. The two houses may come together as a United Federal Assembly in certain circumstances, such as to elect the Federal Council (the head of government and state), the Federal Chancellor, the federal judges or (only in times of great national danger) a general.