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

Switzerland 113
such as the UN or NATO, by simply saying that ‘there is no other choice’, has
understandably left a lot of people cold.
‘First the Italians, then the Turks, now the Kosovars’
Since it is obvious that increasing immigration and the ‘clash of civilizations’
in which Christianity and Islam are said by some to be engaged have
provided excellent opportunities for populist rhetoric (always in need of
new enemies), this section will only touch briefly on the issue. Naturally,
this needs to be seen alongside Switzerland’s love of its uniqueness and
splendid isolation.
Despite a decrease in the number of new migrants reaching Switzerland
during the 1990s, the Swiss population now includes very large numbers of
foreigners by European standards due to the arrivals of economic migrants
in the booming period of 1946−75 as well as the increase in asylum applications
in the 1980s: 23 per cent of the overall population in 2005. Immigration
brought obvious benefits to the Swiss economy by offsetting the ageing of
the natives. Switzerland has never been particularly keen to grant its foreign
workers citizenship rights, even if, until recently, the majority of foreigners
were coming from neighbouring countries, such as Italy. Starting in the
1980s, however, the number of non-EU migrants, and particularly those
from Islamic countries, has risen very sharply. If southern Europeans had
already upset the delicate balance between Protestants and Catholics among
the population, the arrival of Muslims posed further problems of integration,
acceptance and racism (testified by an increase in violent attacks on,
and even murders of, foreigners throughout the 1990s).
The SVP/UDC has been quick to capitalize on the issue (e.g. SVP/UDC,
1999). Its rhetoric has resembled that of the far Right in other European
countries, focusing in particular on the alleged link between immigration
and criminality and the ‘abuse’ of the asylum system. On the other hand,
preoccupation with what some perceive as an excessive number of migrants
is not a 1990s novelty. Rather, just like the Lega Nord in Italy, the SVP/UDC
only brought into the open and gave new legitimization to a resentment
that had already been highlighted, as we have seen, by the number of initiatives
called on the issue since the 1970s.
It’s the economy, stupid ...
The thesis that populist parties attract large crowds of ‘modernization losers’
(Betz, 1994; Kriesi, 1999) holds much water in the case of the SVP/UDC. Of
all the factors mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that have changed
considerably in recent years, the economic outlook of the country throughout
the 1990s is the most apparent. Starting at the end of the 1980s, the
Swiss economy entered a phase of uncertainty from which it has now only
partially recovered. To mention but a few of the problems the country had