Walter Thurnherr Energy and Communications in 2011 as her chief of staff. He stood for election to succeed Corina Casanova as Federal Chancellor of Switzerland on 9 December 2015, as the first unopposed candidate in ninety years, and was elected by the Swiss Federal Assembly with 230 votes (out of 234 possible). He assumed office on 1 January 2016. Walter Thurnherr Walter Thurnherr (born 11 July 1963) is the Federal Chancellor of Switzerland since 1 January 2016. Born in Muri, Thurnherr graduated as a physicist at the ETH Zürich. In 1989, he joined the ranks of Switzerland's diplomatic corps. In 2002, he
Chancellor of Germany (1949–present) set the guidelines for all policy areas, thus making the chancellor the real chief executive. The role is generally comparable to that of a prime minister in other parliamentary democracies. The 8th and current Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany is Angela Merkel, who was elected in 2005 and re-elected in 2009, 2013 and 2018. She is the first female chancellor since the establishment of the original office in 1867 and is known in German as ', the feminine form of '. Merkel is also the first chancellor elected since the fall of the Berlin Wall to have been