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

Switzerland 115
usual ‘elite’ or of being dominated by left wingers. His party has also ‘retaliated’
against public television by putting forward proposals for a reduction
of the licence fee and by suggesting in its most recent electoral programme
that public service broadcasting could be privatized (see SVP/UDC, 2007:
70–73). The Zurich branch has also made use of more or less directly controlled
media through its own party’s paper, Der Zurcher Bauer, but also the
SVP/UDC – sympathetic and anti-EU magazine Schweizerzeit. Furthermore,
mirroring the Lega Nord in Italy, cantonal sections of the party have happily
resorted to the cheap and still effective medium of the wall poster, especially
as far as immigration and taxation were concerned.
The way the Swiss media are changing also works in the populists’ interest.
While the party press is disappearing and in the context of increasing
media ownership concentration (all phenomena that, again, put Switzerland
on a par with the rest of Europe), papers have come to rely very heavily on
advertising and thus need to attract larger readerships in order to survive.
The consequences have been increasing processes of simplification of messages,
the personalization of reporting (focusing on the private lives of candidates,
etc) and dramatization (whereby every piece of news is reduced to ‘a
clash’ between easily identifiable entities of ‘good’ and ‘bad’). All these processes
make populists interesting from a media perspective, as their language
and rhetoric already follows, and at the same time helps to foster, this very
same logic. Following these trends, even public television now shows considerable
interest in political campaigns and has talk shows where tabloidization
processes of political communication are increasingly apparent (e.g.
the programme Arena, in German-speaking Switzerland, which has greatly
facilitated SVP/UDC confrontationalism).
Conclusions: naming the agent
The deeply ingrained culture of consociationalism and power-sharing −
essential to the ‘smooth functioning’ of a divided country where direct
democracy is so central to the political process − has provided the most
important opportunity structure of all for the emergence of populism in
Switzerland. While the wealth of the country during past decades, the possibility
to ‘export’ unemployment (by sending guest-workers home) and
the lack of a perceived external ‘threat’ have all stood in the way of the
emergence of a significant populist challenge (despite the presence of widespread
anti-foreigner and isolationist feelings), as soon as Switzerland
awoke to a rapidly changing globalized world and its supposed uniqueness,
the independence of its ‘knowable’ communities and its economic wellbeing
could all be portrayed as having come under fire, the stage was set for
a populist showdown. Since the beginning of the 1990s, some of
Switzerland’s neighbours such as Austria and Italy provided examples of
populist movements having gone from strength to strength, even taking