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Leuthard becomes third woman president

02 December 2009 15:33 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Doris Leuthard, a Christian Democrat member of the federal cabinet from Aargau was elected Wednesday to serve as the Swiss president for the next 12 months.
Leuthard, 46, is the third woman to head the Swiss government, following Micheline Calmy-Rey, the Socialist cabinet minister from Geneva (2007), and Ruth Dreifuss, also a Socialist party member, who became the first female president in 1999.
Leuthard was comfortably elected to the top post after receiving 158 votes out of 183 from the federal assembly.
She becomes the first German-speaking woman to serve as president (Calmy-Rey and Dreifuss are francophones), although she also speaks French, Italian and English.
A lawyer by training, Leuthard served as a member of the Aargau cantonal parliament from 1997 to 2000 and became a member of the federal parliament in 1999.
She was first elected to the federal cabinet in 2006 as minister of the economy.
Under the Swiss political system, the president is elected annually from the seven-person federal cabinet and never serves for more than one year at a time.