OPINION
While BFD readers’ eyes have been almost certainly, and rightfully, focussed on the voting day on each side of the Tasman two weeks ago, a week later, another general election was held, in far-off Switzerland. While all politics is local, the Swiss elections also seemed to follow a trend sweeping much of the Western world: moving rightward, rejecting the green, open-borders nostrums of the left.
The right-wing Swiss People’s Party is the big winner of Sunday’s Swiss federal elections. The left-wing Green Party is the big loser.
The major winner on Sunday was the right-wing Swiss People’s Party with 28.6% of the vote (+3 percentage points since 2019). The Green Party lost almost four percentage points, falling to 9.4%. Overall, parliament has moved to the right.
SwissInfo
There were moderate gains for the socialist Social Democrats, but otherwise, left-wing parties, especially of the watermelon variety, were the big losers.
Environmental politics has lost its appeal, in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe. The defeat of the Green Party and the Liberal Green Party echoes the difficulties experienced by green parties within the European Union. According to polls, they are also likely to suffer a setback in the European elections in June 2024.
In particular, as voters get a taste of just what, exactly, “climate” policies actually look like in action, they’re backing off fast. The childish antics of the pampered brats of the Climate Cult are also turning voters away in droves.
But the big issue of the election was immigration.
Switzerland famously zealously guards its citizenship, rightly treating it as hard-earned rather than a gift to be squandered, willy-nilly, on the mendicant grifters of Africa and the Middle-East. Particularly tellingly, it has steadily refused to grant citizenship to Klaus Schwab, despite his having lived there most of his life.
Last weekend, Swiss also roundly rejected his open borders vision.
The images of the Italian island of Lampedusa, confronted with a huge influx of migrants from North Africa, went around the world and brought asylum policy back to the forefront during this election year. This has been a boon for the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which has focused its campaign on its favourite theme, the fight against immigration.
With the rise in asylum applications (12,188 between the beginning of January and the end of June, or +43% compared to 2022), in addition to the presence of 65,000 refugees from Ukraine, the Swiss People’s Party was able to capitalise on the growing concerns of part of the population.
Naturally, the open borders elite clutched their pearls and wittered about “racism” — but voters didn’t care.
Brandishing the spectre of a Switzerland with ten million inhabitants on its campaign posters, the People’s Party didn’t mince its words, drawing criticism from the Federal Commission against Racism. Nonetheless, this very clear discourse had a mobilising effect on the party’s base at a time of international insecurity […]
Under the slogan “firm but fair”, the Radical-Liberal Party also made immigration policy one of its priority themes during the election campaign. In contrast to the People’s Party, the Radical-Liberals insisted on the need to maintain the free movement of people to attract skilled European workers, while hammering home its desire to combat “social tourism” and “asylum chaos”.
With this stance and its surprisingly virulent attacks on Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, the Radical-Liberals did not want to leave the field open to the isolationist right on this issue. The fact remains, however, that voters clearly gave more credence to the solutions proposed by the People’s Party.
SwissInfo
Immigration and environmental policy weren’t the only issues, of course. Indeed, the number-one concern of Swiss voters was the rising cost of health insurance premiums. Still, the Social Democrats’ proposal for a universal health scheme was soundly rejected.