Immigration, Black Sheep and Swiss Rage

October 10, 2007, Times Online

One cartoon image has come to crystallise a bitter debate raging at the heart of the most divisive election campaign in the postwar history of Switzerland.

In posters displayed across the Alpine republic by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), a white sheep is shown kicking a black sheep off the red pastures of the Swiss flag. The caption states: “For greater security.” ...

Its poster ... illustrated perfectly one of the party’s key policies, to reintroduce a law expelling foreign criminals once they have completed their sentence for crimes committed in Switzerland ...

Polls indicate that the People’s Party is likely to win elections due on October 21. The party is bankrolled by Christoph Blocher, the billionaire chemicals industrialist who is a lifelong campaigner against immigration and membership of the European Union.

However, his political opponents accuse him of stoking xenophobia ...

Police figures indicate that half of murders were committed by “foreigners” last year ... “We have about 20 per cent foreigners in the country and in the statistics around 40 per cent of crime ..."

The SVP wants to get tougher and has begun a debate on expelling the whole family of a teenage criminal, although it has now put this policy on the backburner. Three years ago it led a campaign to block liberalisation of the citizenship process with a poster showing dark hands reaching for Swiss passports.

Matthias Müller, a spokesman for the SVP, said: “The figures show that we have a severe problem with some immigrants. The increase of crime is caused by the lack of political will of our opponents. In order to cover their failure they try not to discuss the facts but to focus on a wrong interpretation of our campaign.” Growing international criticism of his party’s approach showed a “deep misunderstanding” of Swiss politics, he added. “We are not a racist party but we try to make clear that what is going on in Switzerland is a very dangerous tendency.”

October 8, 2007, NY Times

The posters taped on the walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland’s national electoral campaign: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag as one of them kicks a single black sheep away.

“To Create Security,” the poster reads.

The poster is not the creation of a fringe movement, but of the most powerful party in Switzerland’s federal Parliament and a member of the coalition government, an extreme right-wing party called the Swiss People’s Party, or SVP. It has been distributed in a mass mailing to Swiss households, reproduced in newspapers and magazines and hung as huge billboards across the country.

As voters prepare to go to the polls in a general election on Oct. 21, the poster — and the party’s underlying message — have polarized a country that prides itself on peaceful consensus in politics, neutrality in foreign policy and tolerance in human relations.

Suddenly the campaign has turned into a nationwide debate over the place of immigrants in one of the world’s oldest democracies, and over what it means to be Swiss ...

[On Saturday, a march of several thousand SVP supporters in Bern ended in clashes between hundreds of rock-throwing counterdemonstrators and riot police officers, who used tear gas to disperse them. The opponents of the rally, organized by a new group called the Black Sheep Committee, had tried to prevent the demonstrators from marching to Parliament.] ...

More than 20 percent of Swiss inhabitants are foreign nationals, and the SVP argues that a disproportionate number are lawbreakers. Many drug dealers are foreign, and according to federal statistics, about 70 percent of the prison population is non-Swiss ...

The party’s political campaign has a much broader agenda than simply fighting crime. Its subliminal message is that the influx of foreigners has somehow polluted Swiss society, straining the social welfare system and threatening the very identity of the country ...

SVP officials insist that their campaign is not racist, just anticrime. “Every statistic shows that the participation of foreigners in crime is quite high,” said Ulrich Schlüer, an SVP Parliament deputy who has also led an initiative to ban minarets in Switzerland. “We cannot accept this. We are the only party that addresses this problem.” ...

See also: the Midnight Sun