Switzerland and the EU: One country says yes

The Swiss accept Schengen, but a tougher vote on labour migration lies ahead

AT LEAST one referendum has produced a European Union-friendly result, even if it was in a non-EU country. On June 5th, the notoriously Eurosceptic voters of Switzerland endorsed, by a 55-45% majority, plans to join the 13 European Union countries in the Schengen passport-free travel zone (it already has two other non-EU members, Iceland and Norway). Voters also approved of joining the EU's Dublin agreement on handling asylum seekers, and of participating in more co-ordination of policing and crime-fighting.

Coming only four years after the Swiss rejected talks on EU membership by 77-23%, the decision to join Schengen was essentially pragmatic. This is one of the building-blocks in a series of bilateral accords struck with Brussels over the past four years to let Switzerland reap the practical benefits of co-operation with the EU, while keeping at arm's length the tighter political commitment of full membership. Smaller crossing-points were already deserted because of local police agreements. Customs checks on shoppers and trade will remain.

By saying yes, the Swiss have agreed to entrust at least part of their defensive ring to other countries. The voters also defied the opposition of the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), Switzerland's largest party. The SVP's leader, Christoph Blocher, now justice minister in Bern, had little choice but silently to toe the government line. But his supporters deployed a lurid advertising campaign to whip up fears of a flood of immigrants from eastern Europe. This struck a chord in rural and suburban German-speaking eastern Switzerland, even if not enough of one to defeat the plan.

Another referendum, on September 25th, to approve the extension of a bilateral agreement on the free movement of workers to cover the ten new EU members, may prove a sterner test. Under a guillotine clause agreed with Brussels, its rejection would nullify the bilateral accord on Schengen, and maybe earlier deals too. The campaign will be grubby. Just as the “Polish plumber” symbolised fears of cheap labour from the east during the French referendum, so “Polish butchers” featured in the anti-Schengen drive in Switzerland. They will be back in the run-up to September 25th.

A no vote in September could cause a crisis in Swiss-EU relations: there is, as so often, no plan B. Yet the EU foreign-affairs commissioner, Austria's Benita Ferrero-Waldner, was short-sighted in declaring, just after the vote, that Schengen membership still depended on the September 25th result. The SVP seized on her remarks as “blackmail”. Mrs Ferrero-Waldner may have sliced a few crucial points off the next “yes” vote.

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