The right-wing populist Swiss People’s Party (SVP) has made vast preparations to win next week’s general elections in Switzerland.
SVP’s 83-year-old rightist figurehead Christoph Blocher launched this year’s campaign riding into Zurich’s ice hockey arena on a tractor-trailer on Monday.
Blocher is banking on SVP’s three key principles: no to mass immigration, no to the European Union, and no to the abandonment of Swiss neutrality.
The SVP is the largest party in the 200-member Swiss Federal Assembly, with 53 seats. Six of the 46 seats of the Council of States also belong to SVP.
It claims its candidates’ liberal economic mindset has largely appealed to both the private sector and the working-class, and aims to tackle the expanding “cancel culture” and what it describes as “gender terror and woke madness” across the country.
However, the Swiss Federal Commission against Racism has accused the SVP of running a “xenophobic” campaign on social media by spotlighting criminal cases perpetrated by foreigners.
Its social media sites cite what it categorized as the “New normal?” by displaying photos of bloodied knives, hooded criminals, fists, bruised faces, and frightened women.
“Pure horror: criminals break into your family home at night! And again it was a North African asylum seeker,” one of the SVP advertisements states.
SVP’s President, Marco Chiesa, has dismissed the criticisms against the party, saying its rivals aim to portray the SVP as Nazi, while the party’s members adhere to national conservatism.
Chiesa said the party aims to preserve Switzerland’s political sovereignty and a conservative society where Swiss nationals do not feel more and more like a foreigner in their own country.
“In terms of identity, the SVP is close to being an extreme party but I would not describe it as far-right … even if there are certainly people within the party who have a fairly authoritarian vision of power,” said Pascal Sciarini, a professor of political science at the University of Geneva.
The SVP is “clearly a xenophobic national conservative party.”
