Swiss party heading for victory wants to ban immigration

The Australian

Swiss vote

A far-right Swiss People’s Party poster bears the slogan “That’s enough. Stop mass immigration!”. Picture: AFP Source: AFP

A FAR-right party heading for a record margin of victory in general elections on Sunday has announced plans to turn Switzerland into an immigrant-free bastion.

Polls show that the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) is likely to seal its place as Europe’s most successful populist political force after a campaign targeting immigrants, whom its posters depict as black boots trampling on the Swiss flag.

As the election campaign drew to a close, the SVP announced that it had gathered the requisite 100,000 signatures to call a referendum, under Swiss direct democracy laws, on withdrawing from freedom of travel arrangements with the European Union.

This would mean a return to quotas of migrants from the EU, including Britain, limiting access to the Alpine state and reversing a decade of openness.

European companies would have to go through bureaucratic application procedures for their non-Swiss employees and EU visitors would lose the automatic right to stay there.

Analysts have dismissed the move as an election stunt, not least because a referendum would take up to two years to organise, but it fits a pattern of anti-immigrant campaigns backed by the SVP. These include the recent vote in the lower chamber of parliament to ban the Muslim veil, as well as a referendum last year in which Swiss voters backed a ban on the building of minarets.

“This seems like a last try to get some attention before the election,” said Georg Lutz, the director of Swiss Electoral Studies at the Swiss Foundation for Research in Social Sciences in Lausanne. “I do not think it will make too much difference to the election outcome because the Swiss People’s Party is so far ahead. But it would be a disaster for Switzerland because if they managed to get it through it could mean the end of other bilateral agreements with the EU.

“It is popular, however – there has been a lot of immigration and in certain areas it puts quite serious pressure on the housing market.”

Researchers at the University of Freiburg in Germany, commissioned by the Swiss Liberal Party, have warned that breaching the freedom of movement agreement would lead to the EU cancelling other bilateral arrangements.

Switzerland is not in the EU but it has agreed to allow freedom of cross-border transit and employment for fellow Europeans, and its citizens to travel and work freely across the continent.

Silvia Bar, the SVP deputy-general secretary, said that she simply wanted Switzerland to return to its pre-2002 position of running its borders and immigration.

“We have the problem that there are too many coming from Europe and especially from Germany. They always say they are qualified people but we are not talking about professors of chemistry, it is just anyone who has a degree at university now,” she said.

She denied that the SVP played on fears of foreigners or racism. “If you do not speak about things that people see on a daily basis, you will see racism come. That is why we are talking frankly and clearly about problems we have.”

There is resistance to the party however. Its mascot, a goat, was kidnapped and painted black in protest at the party’s policies.

After its breakthrough election in 1999, the SVP has gone from strength to strength and been the most consistently popular far-right party in Europe.

It stands at 29.3 per cent support in the latest opinion poll, well ahead of the Socialist Party in second place on 19.9 per cent, and higher than its record 28.9 per cent share of the vote in the 2007 election.

The next most consistently successful far-right party is the Freedom Party of Austria, which joined a coalition government in 2000-05, and has polled at 29 per cent support this summer with the next elections due in 2013.

Populist anti-immigrant parties have enjoyed rising success in the Netherlands, Hungary and Finland, where the True Finns increased their vote in this year’s election to 19.1 per cent from 4.1 per cent in 2007. In Denmark support for the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, which was in government for 10 years from 2001, slipped slightly in last month’s election from 13.8 to 12.3 per cent.

Under the Swiss system of consensus government by a seven-member Cabinet, made up of members from at least three parties, the SVP has made it clear that a convincing victory will lead it to demand an extra seat.

The Times

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

15 Replies to “Swiss party heading for victory wants to ban immigration”

  1. Any nation that wants to survive as an free independent nation with its own unique culture has to control immigration, the number must be limited to those that can be easily assimilated. The left wants to destroy the west so they can impose a socialist dictatorship on us, one of the tactics they are using is the open borders policies that allow unlimited immigration of people who often don’t want to assimilate into the base culture.

  2. The article inaccurately states that the ban on minarets was approved last year. That happened in 2009.

  3. You said it, Richard. I have argued with leftists who are actually looking forward to the imminent fall of the West. They are enjoying the financial crisis!

  4. The Swiss are an independent minded people. Everyone else in Western Europe flocked to the EU but not the Swiss.

  5. Anne the left is working hard to start civil wars in all Western nations, if they get very unlucky they will get their wish, the ordinary people aren’t willing to put up with their horse pucky the way they will when the economy is strong.

  6. Richard:
    I am on vacation and I have time to rummage around the web. Not long ago I would have thought your statement:

    “The left wants to destroy the west so they can impose a socialist dictatorship on us, one of the tactics they are using is the open borders policies that allow unlimited immigration of people who often don’t want to assimilate into the base culture.”

    was a little extreme. That was until I started arguing with some lefties on a liberal forum. One guy, an educated guy, a retired history professor, was positively convinced that with 2 months the US would attack Iran and/or Syria, the Middle East would go up in flames, that the US was “in steep decline” and so would use this chance to maintain their tenuous hold on “controlling the world” by using nuclear weapons. The apocalypse was neigh. Also, he maintained all the Republicans in the current primary were plotting to rule the world (kind of inconsistent with the decline of the US).

    He became furious with anyone who did not buy the whole plot. He felt our last hope was a site called “Democracy Now”, that I was not familiar with. I visited it and found it has a lurid tabloid quality, designed to whip up anxiety. I was not impressed.

    He seemed as you say, to be looking forward to the whole thing. It is just so bizarre. So yes, it is not necessarily a co-ordinated plot, but a lot of these left wing types do seem to have some kind of great desire to see the West collapse.

  7. No it isn’t coordinated, if it were we would be in much more danger, it is a large number of people thinking the same way and all working towards the same goal, often without even knowing the other people.

    With Obama and company driving the US to bankruptcy the various nutbucket dictators and groups around the world are seeing a coming period when they will be able to attack anyone with impunity. The left thinks everyone will turn to them for leadership when it is more likely the left will be the last group people turn to.

  8. Things are looking bad in Europe too. When they set up the Eurozone, they were fools to include Greece in it. They knew the government of Greece was totally corrupt. I suppose there was some kind of political correctness there.

    Well, you can get away with letting in huge numbers of immigrants (although people in Europe are starting to rebel against that)…all you have are some sleazy, crime-filled neighbourhoods, that the elites don’t need to live near anyway. But when Greece starts threatening to bring their currency down, suddenly the elites are powerless. Well, not quite, but from what I have been reading, the countries in the Eurozone with functioning economies (dominated by Germany and France) cannot agree on what to do.

    I also agree, there are some very nasty places out there. I am sure the govt of Iran is thinking how this whole mess can help them. And not just them.

  9. Don’t be fooled by the media reports, the entire world is in massive economic problems, the Bank of America is reporting that another US credit rating down grade is coming in a matter of weeks. This is simply the tip of the icebergs, the worlds governments can’t print or borrow enough money to pay off the existing debt, and when they try to pay off the debt the left screams. There is an article in today’s Washington Post about how the Greek government is ripping off Europe by using the bailout money to pay off bond holders. Who did they think the money to pay off the debt was going to go to? The left stopped the schools from teaching basic economics in grade, middle and high school and now the economically ignorant are raising hell because the private individuals who bought Greek Bonds are being paid back their money.

    The Euro zone was a mistake in the first place, despite what the left wants us to think Europe is a continent, not a unified political entity. The idea of one common currency is not taking reality into consideration, all of the European nations are suffering from the use of Keynesian economics,Keynes a leftist thought that command driven economies were the way to growth and prosperity. The command driven economies would prosper by the government using fiat money to control the economy, printing more when the economy needed stimulating and less when it was booming.

    The results of this type of economy is always a disaster, the Great Depression in the US was deepened and lengthened by these policies, the current economic crisis was caused by this and other leftist economic actions. Now when reality is proving the left is wrong they are protesting that we are all suppose to go broke and suffer total collapse rather then return to time tested methods of economic growth and stability.

    In other words keeping Greece and other weak economies out of the Euro zone would have delayed the collapse by a couple of years at best. To fully understand the current mess requires a lot of knowledge of business and economics, and way too many people these days don’t have that knowledge.

  10. I know the US is in severe problems too. I read the financial news quite carefully and it is getting scary all right. I read the Wall Street Journal every day, and also the weekly Economist.

    Both them and The Times (of London) are saying the same thing: orderly default on Greek debt (haircut up to 60% is the latest news), plus possible exit of Greece from the zone. Then Greece can devalue its currency. France and Germany cannot agree because the French banks much more exposure to Greek bonds that the German banks. So it they do an orderly default, then each country will have to take care of its own banks, leaving France worse off. They prefer that Germany join them is keeping Greece on life support, to spread the cost around.

    (ps, I am also on vacation with extra time to read around).

    Agree with atrocious lack of knowledge about economics. I have tried to start several threads on that liberal forum I visit, but when they the words “Greek bond” I think their eyes glaze over and they stop reading. Tried also to educate my Occupy oriented niece about how bad it is in Greece (the Guardian–liberal UK paper–had an article where they interviewed people, all of them complaining about govt corruption and bribes and favoritism). I just tactfully linked to the article on FB. She did not respond.

  11. The next problem that people are ignoring is he looming banking crisis, if/when the Greeks default the European banks will receive a very big hit, some of them will fail and that will bring down more. The biggest problem the worlds economy faces is the refusal of the governments and the people to realize that socialism and command driven economy’s don’t work. The following url is one half (the free half) of an article about the banking problem in Europe.

    http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20111019-special-series-assessing-damage-european-banking-crisis?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20111021&utm_term=freecontent&utm_content=readmore&elq=9b95443d31e9457ba0b3ffda4d2b744c

    Yes the US has problems, mainly caused by massive government borrowing and spending, but partially caused by the government under Clinton ordering the banks to start loaning money to people who couldn’t repay the loans.

    I am trying to think of a way to condense years of study of and working in Accounting to help you but I can’t. I will suggest that you read anything by Von Miese (sp?) he was an Austrian immigrant to the US who was an economists and fought with John Maynard Keynes all the time over command driven v consumer driven economics. Keynes was on the side of command driven and is what the US and other nations now follow. Those policies are the cause of the current mess.

  12. Thanks for the tips on von Mises (Google gave me the spelling!). Excellent article on Stratfor–they are pretty expensive to subscribe I notice. You find it worth it? (I just added the Financial Times yesterday), and also have subscriptions to NYTimes (but skip their op-eds) and The Times (of London). And I am not in the 1% (!) Just like to read.

    Stratfor have it nicely condensed like a mini-book. I have seen the same info on WSJ and Economist but spread over a lot of articles here and there.

  13. Forget to mention: why did I even read Krugman at NYT? He is advocating “quantitative easing” for Europe (i.e., printing money). The Germans have a long memory for inflation disasters however.

  14. I don’t subscribe, I just get the free reports, wish I could afford to subscribe.

    the Von Mises org has his book “Human Action” in downloadable form, it is about 950 pages so it will take a long time to get through. If the world had followed him instead of Keynes we wouldn’t be in this mess.

    I am currently living on a VA disability, I only read what is free, wish I could afford to buy subscriptions. Check out the Daily Telegraph (telegraph.co.uk) anything by Ambrose Evens-Pritchard (sp?) is worth reading, he is one of the sources I use to get my info on the state of the Chinese economy, it is in worse shape then ours.

  15. I stopped reading almost everything in the New York Times a long time ago, and yes QE is a real bad ides, hopefully the inflation in the US that is a result of QE won’t be double digit.