I was interested to see reports in the media that the Swiss election had resulted in a substantial gain for a very right-wing party running on an anti-immigration platform. The New York Times had run a piece on the Swiss People’s Party, and I’d been shown the ad that offended so many people – a piece of very clever design carrying a clear stealth meaning.
So there was only one thing to do – contact Kiwi In Zurich to throw down some wisdom in a guest post. KiZ, take it away…
A foreigner living in Switzerland doesn’t get the right to vote. Foreigners (except for the extremely wealthy ones) do however get the right to pay tax at a higher rate than the Swiss. Both of these points miff me a bit, but when you are a guest in someone else’s country you put up with much more than you’d be prepared to put up with in your own country.
The weekend before last witnessed the Swiss parliamentary general elections, and despite not being able to vote, I was nevertheless drawn into the elections. This year was always going to be an interesting election as the SVP party (the right wing Swiss People’s Party) managed to polarise the electorate through its anti-foreigner (http://www.ausschaffungsinitiative.ch/), cult personality advertising campaign and its stated intention to become the dominant party in the Swiss parliament.
The results on the weekend unfortunately (to my mind at least) partially bore out SVP’s success in playing the always populist anti-foreigner card with SVP attaining an historic high. The ‘historic high’ has to be taken in context however. Although the SVP received 28.8% of the vote, which hasn’t been equalled by any single party in the Parliament since 1919, what I find more interesting than SVP’s success, however, is that the single biggest winners were the two Green parties (the ‘standard’ Greens and the Green Liberal Party). The Green parties attained at the cost of SP (the left socialist party) a staggering 9.5% of the vote and are now trying to wrangle a seat on the Executive (in Switzerland the Executive, unusually, is made up of all the largest parties in parliament).
Predictably, the media characterised the results in the most sensational way possible, describing the elections as a move towards right wing extremism in Switzerland. This is hardly the case. It is true the Socialist Party (SP), the major left party did lose a significant share of their vote, but it is not the case, nor would one expect it to be the case, that those left voters simply decided to vote right rather than left. Rather, what actually happened is that a significant number of voters moved further to the left and voted Green. Where the media is concerned, I guess it just isn’t terribly sexy to talk about a dramatic move to the left by the otherwise conservative Swiss.
I draw three things from the results:
• The environment and green politics are a significant concern to the Swiss electorate (hardly surprising with the glaciers melting)
• The SP party have not successfully picked up the environmental agenda and have failed to inspire the electorate generally, thus fragmenting the left
• The SVP managed to play the politics of personality, fear and populism in order to successfully increase their share, thus polarising the electorate
Just to complete the picture, the SVP historic high was attained at the cost of the various independents who lost a total 1.4% of their votes. Given that independents are not members of any major party, it seems a bit rich to me to describe this as a move to the right.
The German newspapers describe the election as been the end of kuschel-politik (politics of consensus) in Switzerland and this is perhaps the most interesting development this election may represent. By ‘kuschel politics’, the Germans are referring to the Swiss tendency towards moderation and consensus, rather than the confrontation that characterises almost all other political systems. The polarisation seems partly to be caused by SVP being the only truly right party of any size and its in many ways utterly xenophobic and unrealistic policies which the well educated and moderate Swiss electorate and politicians have up until now been able to respond to and moderate. If the dramatic strengthening of the Greens who are in their own (but much nicer) way as intolerant as the SVPs is not only a result of the raised environmental awareness, but also as response to the extreme politics of the SVP then perhaps this will herald the end of the Swiss cushion politics. My guess is that it won’t. The Swiss tend to be a remarkably moderate group of people and I don’t see the politics and culture of consensus being eroded anytime soon as it is this very consensus that makes the country as stable and successful as it is.
