{"id":664,"date":"2007-11-02T00:51:21","date_gmt":"2007-11-02T00:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=664"},"modified":"2007-11-02T00:51:21","modified_gmt":"2007-11-02T00:51:21","slug":"guest-blog-swiss-election-outcome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=664","title":{"rendered":"Guest Blog: Swiss Election Outcome"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> on the Swiss People’s Party, and I’d been shown the ad that offended so many people<\/a> – a piece of very clever design carrying a clear stealth meaning.
\nSo there was only one thing to do – contact Kiwi In Zurich<\/strong> to throw down some wisdom in a guest post. KiZ, take it away…<\/em>
\nA foreigner living in Switzerland doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s country you put up with much more than you\u2019d be prepared to put up with in your own country.
\nThe 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\u2019s 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.
\nThe results on the weekend unfortunately (to my mind at least) partially bore out SVP\u2019s success in playing the always populist anti-foreigner card with SVP attaining an historic high. The \u2018historic high\u2019 has to be taken in context however. Although the SVP received 28.8% of the vote, which hasn\u2019t been equalled by any single party in the Parliament since 1919, what I find more interesting than SVP\u2019s success, however, is that the single biggest winners were the two Green parties (the \u2018standard\u2019 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).
\nPredictably, 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\u2019t terribly sexy to talk about a dramatic move to the left by the otherwise conservative Swiss.
\nI draw three things from the results:
\n\u2022 The environment and green politics are a significant concern to the Swiss electorate (hardly surprising with the glaciers melting)
\n\u2022 The SP party have not successfully picked up the environmental agenda and have failed to inspire the electorate generally, thus fragmenting the left
\n\u2022 The SVP managed to play the politics of personality, fear and populism in order to successfully increase their share, thus polarising the electorate
\nJust 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.
\nThe 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 \u2018kuschel politics\u2019, 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\u2019t. The Swiss tend to be a remarkably moderate group of people and I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Guest Blog: Swiss Election Outcome<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-aI","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}