SVP off target with foreigner stance

Swiss voters appeared last night to have denied nationalists the 30 per cent share of the vote they had been aiming for, turning against the People’s Party’s relentless campaign against immigration.

The People’s Party (SVP) had come well ahead of other parties, at 29.3 per cent in a recent opinion poll, running campaign ads warning of immigrants spoiling the Alpine nation.

But exit polls yesterday in the vote for 245 seats in Switzerland’s upper and lower chamber indicated the party will miss its target of 30 per cent.

The SVP was down 2.1 per centage points compared with the last election in 2007, but was still on track to be the biggest party with 26.8 per cent of the vote, according to a national projection based on partial results and provided by Swiss television.

The parliamentary election heavily influences the composition of the seven-member cabinet, where the ministers run federal agencies and take turns as president for a year. The result of this election, which is held once every four years, could lead to a shift in Switzerland’s multi-party, consensus-led cabinet.

Switzerland’s president and foreign minister, Micheline Calmy-Rey, is retiring from Swiss politics at the end of this year. The seat vacated by Calmy-Rey, one of the country’s most colourful politicians, will be hotly contested during a 14 December parliamentary vote for all seven cabinet seats.

The People’s Party has accused foreigners of driving up Switzerland’s crime rate, and campaigned for those convicted of crimes to be deported. It also wants to reintroduce quotas on immigration from the 27 countries of the European Union, of which Switzerland isn’t a member.

Its striking posters of black boots stomping on the Swiss flag with the message “Stop Mass Immigration” build on earlier graphically successful campaigns featuring white sheep kicking out a black sheep or dark hands grasping for Swiss passports.

“For us it’s not acceptable that we have to open the frontiers and we have no possibility to say who can come, and under which conditions. We want to regulate this,” said Oskar Freysinger, a hardline People’s Party MP.

Foreigners, who make up some 22 per cent of the 7.9 million population, have been blamed for rising rents, crowded public transport and even higher electricity bills.

In the capital, Bern, yesterday, architect Timo Odoni expressed disquiet at the People’s Party’s relentless focus on foreigners.

Pushing a buggy with his twin one-year-old sons – half Swiss, half Sri Lankan – he pointed to one of the Swiss nationalists’ posters. “I just can’t stand how they do their posters because it reminds me of 60 years before, in Germany, a little bit. And we have to do something about it,” Mr Odoni said.