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
Federal Chancellery of Switzerland offices of the Swiss Confederation. During the first years, the Federal Chancellor was tasked with managing the protocol and the agenda of the tagsatzung, writing and printing the recess notes, the correspondence with the cantons and foreign nations, and maintaining the Federal archives. After 1848, the Chancellery was attached to the Federal Department of Home Affairs until 1895, then to the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs until 1967, when it became an independent body. Since 2007, the Federal Language Law (Sprachengesetz, Loi sur les langues, Legge sulle lingue, Lescha da linguas) requires "that official language use must be adequate, clear