I took the trouble to find out how many of the 100 cantonal councillors are of retirement age. In total, I counted 17 men and 2 women who are already of retirement age. That makes 19% of the cantonal parliament.

Let's compare this to the resident population of the canton of Basel-Stadt: At the end of 2018, the canton had 200,256 people. Of these, 38,844 people were older than 65. What a surprise: that's 19.4%!

My personal opinion on this: people of AHV age are adequately represented in the Basel cantonal parliament – even if the proportion of retired women could certainly be increased!

Beatrice Messerli, Grand Councillor of the Green Alliance group, has the honour of being the oldest woman in the Grand Council. I asked her what advantages she sees in having a say in Parliament as a retired teacher after 41 years of service to the school.

Beatrice Messerli says that she now has more time for political work in the council and is probably less blind to the school's operations, even though she is still very closely connected to her former colleagues.

She admires her young colleagues in the council who manage to juggle family and career as well as a parliamentary mandate. After all, working in the Grand Council is quite time-consuming and a real challenge.

When I pointed out that there are too few retired women in parliament, Beatrice Messerli said that she hoped that women would have the courage to remain involved in politics even after their retirement.

And what does Beatrice Messerli say about the startup Seniors@Work: The website makes a totally fresh impression! Great!