Switzerland’s election: Mob rule OK

Date: 25/10/03

Success for the xenophobic right in the Swiss election

FEW members of a European coalition government would dare to publish a newspaper advertisement that brazenly blames crime on “black Africans”. Yet the Swiss People's Party, or SVP, part of Switzerland's four-party federal council, did so repeatedly before the country's general election on October 19th. The right-wing party's onslaught on asylum-seekers and foreigners drew unusually stern condemnation from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this, the SVP was rewarded with just under 27% of the vote, making it for the first time the biggest parliamentary party. That has boosted the legitimacy of its demands for more say in the Swiss government, alongside the centre-right Radicals, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists. The outcome may yet upset 44 years of political stability.

Christoph Blocher, the champion of isolationism who has driven the SVP to the right over the past decade, will stand for a second ministerial post for the party when parliament chooses the seven-member federal council on December 10th (there is no formal prime minister). He insists that his supporters do not have anything against foreigners with work permits: they object only to illegal immigrants. Just as well, for the polymers firm that made Mr Blocher's fortune depends on the fifth of Switzerland's population who are foreign residents to keep its factories going, as do many of the country's hotels, farms and businesses. As for asylum-seekers, in a referendum last year Swiss voters rejected plans to make it harder for them to come into the country, albeit by a tiny majority.

The headline-grabbing advert, which came at the tail-end of a lacklustre campaign, might have won the SVP some votes in western, French-speaking border areas, where it had been weak. But the number of asylum-seekers has anyway fallen by over half since the end of large-scale fighting in the Balkans. Membership of the European Union, another object of the SVP's ire, was off the political agenda well before the election. Voters instead put a stagnant economy, rising unemployment and pension worries at the top of their concerns, according to opinion polls. Under Mr Blocher's guidance, the SVP duly added demands for lower taxes and less state pampering to its programme.

The SVP has risen from a steady 11% or so of the poll before 1991 mainly by sucking votes away from smaller far-right parties. Now it has started to do the same to the flailing centre-right, especially the Radicals. The Radicals have usually been in charge of the economy, and have therefore taken the blame for slow growth and rising unemployment. The Radical interior minister, Pascal Couchepin, lost further support by bluntly proposing an increase in the retirement age from 65 to 67 and also yet another rise in health-insurance premiums.

For all the publicity about Mr Blocher's progress, the left has also quietly made gains. The Social Democrats finished with 23% of the vote. After an exceptionally hot summer that melted some of Switzerland's Alpine glaciers, the Greens also did well, scoring 7.4% of the vote.

Some fear that a growing divide between left and right, with little between, could make the consensus that underpins Switzerland's system of government harder to achieve. One hope is that the other parties put aside their qualms and allow the uncompromising Mr Blocher into the federal council - only for him to find his voice stifled by one of those enduring Swiss traditions that he so vehemently defends: collegiality.