Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

Switzerland 105
top of the political agenda and helped split the country right down the
middle on international affairs. The anti-EU lobby does not waste any
opportunities to voice anger and alarm at the Union’s supposed interference
in Swiss affairs (Church, 2003: 9) and, as long as these issues stay at the top
of the agenda, there is only one nationally based party that can benefit from
them. It is, therefore, to this party that we turn to now.
The SVP/UDC
The SVP/UDC as such was formed in 1971, as the product of a merger
between the Party of Peasants, Craftsmen and Burghers (which had been a
member of the national government and a critic of the then-dominant
Liberal-Radical party since 1929), and the old Democratic Party. Since the
beginning of the 1990s, the party has undergone a process of radicalization
led by the Zurich-based leader, Christoph Blocher. Like the FPÖ in Austria,
but unlike Forza Italia in Italy (see Reinhard Heinisch and Marco Tarchi in
this volume) therefore, the SVP/UDC was not a ‘new challenger’ which had
to find a political space at the expense of other established parties. Voters
already knew the party when it started to radicalize by adapting a traditional,
family orientated conservative ideology − in line with what was happening
elsewhere in the Alpine region. The process was led by the Zurich
party-branch and profoundly changed it (despite opposition from the Berne
branch). However, such reorganization is not comparable to the challenge of
creating a successful campaigning organization from scratch in a country
where, despite increasing dissatisfaction in recent years with government
performance, the ruling parties have attracted, on average, between a minimum
of 68.7 per cent and a maximum of over 80 per cent of votes at elections
held over the last four decades.
At present, the SVP/UDC’s rhetoric insists on the following key ideas (see
SVP/UDC, 2003; 2007). First, there is criticism of a political system (the
‘elite’, the ‘political class’, ‘une clique’) which Blocher depicts as self-serving,
if not outright corrupt, and conspiring behind the backs of ‘the people’.
Switzerland does not ‘belong’ to this elite, as even its very creation as a
nation is owed to a process generated ‘from below’ (Blocher, 2006). The
people are sovereign and, together with parliament, have legislative power.
Their ability, therefore, to take decisions affecting the life of the country
should be guaranteed and not find any limitations in international treaties/
conventions, such as the European Convention on Human Rights. Fighting
on behalf of the people also means questioning how public money is spent
by the elite. Second come identitarian politics: anti-immigration and opposition
to ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, with crime statistics being used to highlight
the ‘dangers’ of the melting pot (SVP/UDC, 2006: 3). It is not by chance that
the first referendum ever launched by the SVP/UDC in 1993 was concerned
precisely with ‘illegal immigration’. Third, there is the defence of the