Full text of DOI:10.1093/pa/53.3.501

Switzerland: Right-Wing and Xenophobic Parties,
from Margin to Mainstream?
BY CHRISTOPHER T. HUSBANDS
SWITZERLAND presents a paradox to most of its observers. Its surface
appearance is of calmness and serenity, a surprising success in the task
of blending together into a single polity communities that are disparate
in language, religion and cultural traditions. Indices of economic and
social success are exemplary, due to the benign consociational effects of
multiple cross-cutting social cleavages:1 an almost-zero strike rate
because of corporatist accommodations between employers and trade
unions; rates of unemployment that, despite increases compared with
thirty years ago, are still below those in most other west European
countries; and official crime rates so much lower than those of many
comparable countries that attempts at explanation once attracted inter-
national criminological attention.2 There are contradictions, however,
as well as social divisions not far beneath its apparently smooth surface.
Despite attempts by popular initiative, unsuccessful in any case, to
change its military call-up practices, it remains a militaristic society long
after the objective need for a large available military has evaporated; its
adult males still face the prospect of compulsory service until the age of
fifty. Yet Swiss soldiers’ involvement in military action has usually been
little more than that of the Divisionaire Krueger (sic, the French word
now always has double-n) in Graham Greene’s 1980 novel, Doctor
Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party; despite a long career in military
service, the only wound in action that the Divisionaire had ever received
was a nip on his finger from a live lobster served at a private dinner
party. The unfortunate Switzerland has intermittently been the butt of
such sarcasm, on a previous occasion most famously with the jibe about
the cuckoo clock in The Third Man, a film whose screenplay was
written by Greene, although the specific speech was supplied, as well as
spoken, by Orson Welles.
The Swiss government has since 1959 been a four-party corporatist
coalition of the liberal Freisinnig-Demokratische Partei der Schweiz
(FDP), the left-leaning Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz (SPS),
the centre-right Christlichdemokratische Volkspartei der Schweiz
(CVP), and the right-wing populist and currently controversial Schweiz-
erische Volkspartei (SVP).3 The continuity of this coalition became so
apparently assured, at least until the electoral success of the Schweizer-
ische Volkspartei in 1999, that participation in general elections in a
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county whose constitution elevates participatory democracy almost to a
fetish, with its commitment to referenda and popular initiatives, is
usually among the lowest in western Europe. Indeed, many domestic
critics have long been observing that, on the basis of actual participation
in elections, Switzerland has become a democracy in crisis. Several other
examples of subterranean tensions may be seen in the past couple of
decades, such as squatting movements and riots by squatters in some of
the major cities such as Zu¨rich.
However, its vulnerabilities are perhaps best revealed in its attitude
to its resident foreign population, despite the fact that Switzerland has
been an immigrant-dependent society and economy throughout the
twentieth century and back into the nineteenth. If reaction to immi-
grants is the ‘barium meal’ test of a society’s cultural maturity, Switzer-
land has often failed to pass it. For example, naturalisation and
citizenship processes are handled by the country’s individual cantons
and it is true to say that not all are equally inflexible and narrow-
minded in their practices and policies on this matter. Nonetheless, some
have in the past insisted on various demonstrations of ‘Swissness’, a test
failed spectacularly in one of the German-speaking rural cantons in the
1980s in a case that attracted minor international notoriety, when an
unfortunate soul was rash enough to admit to disliking the sound of
cowbells, even after many years in the country. The attitudinal syn-
drome revealed by such incidents is a subject that liberal and radical
Swiss writers, filmmakers and playwrights have satirised, gently or with
considerable causticity. Rolf Lyssy’s 1978 Die Schweizermacher poked
elaborate fun at the procedures used by two police immigration officers
to establish ‘Swissness’. Also, one Italian applicant for Swiss citizenship
in the film had so over-identified with Wilhelm Tell during his natural-
isation interviews that, while subsequently rejoicing in his success at
finally achieving citizenship, he allowed himself to be goaded at the
celebratory party by his less ‘Swissness’-afflicted former compatriot
friends into shooting an apple from his son’s head using a bow and an
arrow tipped with a rubber sucker. However, from the Italian perspec-
tive the same theme was not a subject for humour. Franco Brusati’s not
wholly impressive 1973 film, Pane e Cioccolata, contained some amus-
ing vignettes, especially in the early scenes, but soon changed to a much
more embittered mood.
The Swiss cultural and literary avant-garde has long been attracted
by the tensions and dramas associated with the Swiss and immigration.
For example, Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta, Swiss film directors
who between them did much to keep alive the otherwise limited
reputation of Swiss cinema during the 1970s and 1980s, dealt challeng-
ingly in some of their work with the foreigner/immigration issue in
Switzerland. The marxist Tanner’s stunning Le Milieu du Monde, made
in 1974, concerned an ultimately unsuccessful relationship between an
Italian immigrant-worker waitress, played by Juliet Berto, and a bour-

Extreme Right in Switzerland
503
geois (and married) Swiss politician, who was unable to accept her
across the nationality and class divisions between them. The man,
incidentally, could not at first believe that in contemporary Switzerland
there existed accommodation with only shared toilet facilities! Goretta’s
La Mort de Mario Ricci, which appeared somewhat later, in 1983,
concerned a journalist who was pursuing a story in a Swiss village and
became distracted from this by raising queries about the death of the
eponymous young Italian immigrant worker.
Even more famously, the playwright, Max Frisch, has produced
perhaps the most acerbic single aphorism about the attitudes of many
Swiss towards the immigrants working in their country. Now perhaps
dated by the emergence of the political-asylum issue, it still has an
undoubted directness: ‘A puny master race sees itself in danger: it called
for a labour force and those who are coming are human beings. They
do not destroy prosperity; on the contrary, they are essential for
prosperity. But they are there.’4 Andorra, probably Frisch’s most
famous drama, first produced in 1961, was about how a community
turned against its Jewish member in response to an outside threat, a
clearly intended allegory of aspects of Switzerland’s behaviour during
the second world war, which only in very recent years has received
serious, and even then contentious, attention in the country. Its ambiv-
alence and uncertainty towards foreigners, both those outside and those
in its midst, has historical analogies to some contemporary reactions to
those seeking to come in. Professional historians, such as Alfred Ha¨sler
in Das Boot ist Voll5 (with a new edition in 1989), which was drawn
upon in a film of the same title made in 1981 and directed by the avant-
garde film-maker Markus Imhoof, long ago documented the story of
Swiss attitudes to Jewish refugees, large numbers of whom were turned
back into Nazi Germany to their death. It is ironic to note the durability
of the ‘boat’ metaphor and the same phrase is widely used, in Switzer-
land and other west European countries to summarise the case against
the admission of political-asylum seekers. As will be seen, this latter
issue has been central to the appeal of the extreme and neo-conservative
right in contemporary Switzerland.
The critical international scrutiny during the last several years of
many aspects of Switzerland’s role during the second world war,
including numerous questionable features of its relationship with Nazi
Germany beyond its treatment of Jewish refugees attempting escape and
the dubious, often unscrupulous, attitudes of some of its bankers
towards the deposits made by Holocaust victims has been far from
welcome in some sections of Swiss society. Indeed, it is noteworthy that
some of the functionaries of the Schweizerische Volkspartei have been
especially hostile. The whole issue has undoubtedly produced a certain
defensive nationalism. Even the liberal Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung, whilst
giving much space to articles on ‘Shadows of the Second World War’,
has not been immune to occasional displays of ‘Schadenfreude’ when

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morally unacceptable behaviour by other non-combatant countries,
such as Sweden, has been exposed.
Extreme-right and xenophobic politics in Switzerland,
1930–2000
In the year 2000 it may fairly be said that xenophobic fringe political
parties are of almost inconsequential significance in Switzerland, largely
due to the successful surge during the 1990s of the Schweizerische
Volkspartei and also because they are victims of a general shift in recent
Swiss electoral politics against all small marginal parties. However,
before describing how this situation came about, it is useful to consider
the historical evolution of extreme-right and xenophobic politics in
Switzerland. This is presented in three periods: the pre-war and second
world war period till 1945; the postwar period till 1985, when the
Autopartei der Schweiz was founded; and the period from 1985 till the
present.
the period till 1945. The multilingual and consociational charac-
ter of Switzerland is a rich source of diversity and multiplication in
national life, in politics as well as in other spheres. Although some
Swiss political parties may seek to be organised on a national basis and
have titles equally in all the national languages, most have a particular
identity with one rather than the other linguistic communities and so
draw their support accordingly. Others unabashedly organise only
within one linguistic community and the potential for multiplicity is
correspondingly increased. Taking only German-speaking Switzerland,
some 40 fascist movements have been identified between 1925 and
1944, with particular surges of organisational activity in 1933 (the year
of the so-called ‘Front spring’ in the light of contemporary events in
Germany), 1940 and 1941.6 The Nationale Front is undoubtedly the
most important of these movements. Founded in Zu¨rich in 1930, it had
200 local groups by 1935, as well as others abroad. Wearing the grey
shirt as its uniform had been proscribed in 1932. At its height it had
9,200 members and national and cantonal electoral representation. For
example, in Zu¨rich canton it won 6.2% of votes and six of 180 seats in
1935. In Schaffhausen canton (in north-east Switzerland) in September
1933 it won 27% of the vote. The party dissolved itself in March 1940
in order to avoid proscription and prosecution as a consequence of an
ongoing official enquiry. It had absorbed the Neue Front in 1933 and
worked with similar movements in launching publicity and meetings.7
Perhaps its now best-known supporter was the soldier, Emil Sondereg-
ger (1868–1934), who had been in charge of troops in Zu¨rich in the
country’s 1918 general strike and was the Chief of the Army’s General
Staff from 1920 to 1923.8
In Swiss-speaking Switzerland the Fe´de´ration Fasciste Suisse was the
only French-speaking movement with pan-Swiss support and organisa-

Extreme Right in Switzerland
505
tion. Founded in 1933 and led by Arthur Fonjallez (1875–1944), who
had been a university teacher of war history, it had connections with
Mussolini’s Italy. A further movement, the Union Nationale, subject of
a major study by Joseph, was founded in 1932 in Geneva and also
aspired to pan-Swiss influence.9 It was active till 1939, when it dissolved
amid internal divisions, although some of its senior activists founded or
moved into other movements and in some cases worked for the Ger-
mans during the war. Unsurprisingly in view of the proximity to
Mussolini’s Italy, the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland, Ticino,
also produced extreme-right activities. The Lega Nazionale Ticinese
was founded in 1933 by Alfonso Riva, a lawyer, who had also been
influenced by Charles Maurras’ Action Franc¸aise. In February 1935 it
won two of 63 cantonal seats in Ticino, although with only 2.5% of
votes.
After the cessation of overt hostilities in June 1940 in western Europe
between the Germans and their conquered neighbours, the Dutch, the
Belgians and the French, and in the light of the country’s abutment on
to Austria and Italy, the Swiss had every expectation that they would
be invaded by Hitler’s Germany, a fear that persisted into 1941.10 In
1940 there had been panic movements by the civilian population away
from border areas. There seems no doubt that, had Germany success-
fully invaded, there would have been a core of fascist sympathisers
willing to offer their services to the occupying power, as was the case
in The Netherlands and of course, perhaps most famously, Norway.
On the other hand, this core would probably have been relatively small
and it would be a mistake to contribute to the impression that an
invasion of Switzerland or a Swiss ‘Anschluss’ would have been wel-
comed in the style of the Austrian example in 1938.
the postwar period till 1985. As in other west European coun-
tries after the war, extreme-right activities in Switzerland necessarily
entered a ‘catacombs period’ from which some have never emerged.
True, there are neo-nazi tendencies in Switzerland, in recent years often
associated with sporting defence groups or with skinheads, but the
Swiss state has managed to maintain control over these.11 On the other
hand, whereas the extreme right in western European politics has only
since the mid- and late 1970s come to rely strongly on xenophobic and
racist appeals, Switzerland (like Great Britain) offers early, quite suc-
cessful, examples of the xenophobic politics that later emerged in many
other west European countries.
Switzerland, as mentioned earlier, has a long tradition of using
immigrant labour, a practice that stretches well back into the nine-
teenth century. Indeed, in Zu¨rich in July 1896 there were major riots
involving attacks on Italian workers12 that had exactly the hallmarks
of ‘communal riots’, to use the expression introduced by Janowitz in
the 1960s and as seen in the United States, for example, famously

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in Chicago in 1919 or in Detroit in 1943.13 By the postwar period
Swiss immigration policy had been fully formalised and the country
had, and still has, a distinctively high foreign-resident population. A
strongly parochial strain in Swiss national culture, associated especially
but far from exclusively with the German-speaking section of the
country, reacted against the importation of foreign influences, seeing
these as diluting intrinsic features of the Swiss national character. The
¨
concept of ‘Uberfremdung’, already established in the German lan-
guage from the 1920s with at that time a distinctly anti-Semitic and
then racist connotation (which remained one of its principal meanings
in the Nazi era, although it was also used to mean monopoly owner-
ship by foreign concerns),14 was applied in order to describe the per-
ceived threat to national culture and identity. Indeed, with that in
mind, James E. Schwarzenbach (1911–94) established as early as 1961
¨
the Nationale Aktion gegen die Uberfremdung von Volk und Heimat
(National Action against Excessive Foreign Influence on People and
Homeland). Schwarzenbach was a substantial figure, son of an indus-
trialist, had studied history at the University of Fribourg and was the
owner of a publishing house. The Nationale Aktion’s first foray into
national politics was in the October 1967 elections to the National
Council (the lower chamber of the Swiss national legislature), when it
won 0.6% of the vote but stood only in the Zu¨rich and Basel-City
cantons. This, however, was enough to win for Schwarzenbach a single
parliamentary seat from Zu¨rich. By 1971 Schwarzenbach had split
from the original organisation to found the rival Schweizerische
Republikanische Bewegung and between them the two formations won
more than 7% of the vote in the 1971 National Council elections;
their successes were even higher in certain cantons. Yet that was a
temporary peak, followed by slippages in 1975 and 1979. This hae-
morrhaging of support was one factor inducing Nationale Aktion to
change its name, which it did in 1977 to Nationale Aktion fu¨r Volk
und Heimat (National Action for People and Homeland). By 1983, as
the asylum-seekers issue first emerged on to the national political
agenda, there was a noticeable upturn to 3.5% won by a joint ticket
of Nationale Aktion and the Schweizerische Republikanische Bewe-
gung. Throughout the 1980s the former benefited at national, cantonal
and municipal levels from controversies about asylum-seekers in Swit-
zerland, this being a particular form of xenophobia that has continued
its influence to the present. In Berne City Council elections in 1984
Nationale Aktion won 10.9% of the vote and nine out of 80 seats. In
Zu¨rich in March 1986 it won almost 10% of votes in City Council
elections, giving it 11 out of 125 seats. In Geneva, its companion anti–
immigrant movement, Vigilance (which was based exclusively in the
Geneva canton and had been founded as long ago as 1964) won
19.0% of votes and 19 seats in elections to the cantonal parliament in
1985!

Extreme Right in Switzerland
507
the period from 1985 till the present. In 1985 a group of
conservative activists led by Michael E. Dreher, a Zu¨rich lawyer,
founded the then-called Autopartei der Schweiz, renamed from 1992 (if
only after some internal controversy) the Freiheitspartei der Schweiz.
The party began, as its name implies, as a bourgeois party oriented to
the interests of motorists and was self-avowedly anti-environment,
resorting on occasion to phrases like ‘ozone hysteria’. However, it also
came to adopt a xenophobic and ‘outside right’ position, being equally
active in a number of referenda and initiatives whose subjects emphasi-
sed Swiss autonomy (see below). The Autopartei started modestly in
the National Council elections in 1987, winning two seats, but by the
1991 equivalent elections it was able to benefit from the partial melt-
down of political allegiances in a number of west European countries
that came about with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conse-
quential upheaval in international relations. Nationale Aktion, now
renamed the Schweizer Demokraten, won five National Council seats
in 1991 and the Autopartei as many as eight. There was some relapse
in 1995, although the Schweizer Demokraten and the Freiheitspartei
between them still retained ten National Council seats, with significant
shares of the vote in some cantons. However, the 1999 National
Council elections were marked by the fruition of a process that had
begun in the early 1990s, when the Schweizerische Volkspartei (starting
in particular with its Zu¨rich group under the now internationally
known Christoph Blocher) became more strident in its opposition to
asylum-applicants in Switzerland. The party’s share of the National
Council vote rose from 15 to 23% between 1995 and 1999, making it
the largest national party. The Schweizer Demokraten fell back to 1.8%
and one parliamentary seat, retaining a significant share of the vote in
very few cantons, of which one was Basel-Country. The Freiheitspartei
effectively suffered obliteration and some local groups have attached
themselves to other parties, especially to the Schweizerische Volkspartei.
A relative similarity between the Freiheitspartei’s social base and that
of the more successful Schweizerische Volkspartei has weakened the
former since at least the mid-1990s (in 1996, for example, its President,
Roland Borer, was earnestly seeking to re-establish his party as the
‘only middle-class opposition party’ (NZZ, 12.2.96)). By February
2000, as the party faced disintegration and internal schism, it was
announcing in a press release as a riposte to internal dissidents that ‘the
Freiheitspartei wants with calmness, peace and friendship to separate
itself from those who see their political home in another party’ (NZZ,
14.2.00).
As already mentioned, there has been a general winnowing of the
Swiss party system that has affected almost all of the smaller parties.
For example, the Landesring der Unabha¨ngigen, active since 1935 and
with 16 out of 200 National Council seats at its height in 1967,
retained a mere one in 1999. The left-wing fringe and even the Swiss

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Greens have also suffered a disintegration of support during the 1990s.
That said, it remains plausible to argue that the Schweizer Demokraten
and the Freiheitspartei have been the eventual victims of the classic
squeeze faced by single-issue or few-issues parties (NZZ, 26.10.99);
they are vulnerable to having the principal basis of their appeal co-
opted, even if in sanitised form, by a mainstream party offering greater
possibility of implementation. Even a cursory examination of the press
propaganda and the website of the Schweizerische Volkspartei made
very clear that the purported ‘abuse of asylum’ was a central issue upon
which it campaigned before the 1999 National Council elections. Of
course, this process is not necessarily irreversible; but as long as such a
mainstream party can retain its nerve in pushing for issues in ways that
other mainstream political actors may nonetheless view as unsavoury,
there is every prospect of a permanent death-blow to these fringe
parties.
other marginal right-wing parties. It is relevant to mention
that there are in Switzerland a number of other marginal right-wing
parties that are of sufficient size to feature in some of the reported
election and referendum data, although they scarcely attain the status
of bit players in the dramas described in this article. Perhaps foremost
is the Lega dei Ticinesi. Founded in the late 1980s and with a title that
is a deliberate analogue of the Italian Lega Nord of Umberto Bossi, this
is a right-wing formation advocating greater autonomy for the largely
Italian-speaking canton of Ticino. Having emerged with two seats from
the 1991 National Council elections, it has worked at the parliamentary
level with the Schweizer Demokraten, who of course have had only a
single National Council seat since 1999.
The ideological basis of the Swiss xenophobic parties
It is a paradoxical task to attempt an account of the ideological features
of the Swiss xenophobic parties. The reason is that the Schweizer
Demokraten in particular and in recent years the Freiheitspartei have
undoubtedly been associated in the public mind very much with immi-
gration and asylum issues; yet both parties, in their propaganda, their
election manifestos and—within the past couple of years—their websi-
tes, have had publicly disseminated stances on most other issues of
contemporary Swiss politics. Of course, this characterisation needs
nuancing; the Freiheitspartei, for example, sufficiently remembers its
roots to want to continue holding the fort for the supposedly embattled
motorist against the assaults of the environment lobby. The Schweizer-
ische Volkspartei, as a mainstream party that has recently cultivated
xenophobic mobilisation, fits this single-issue designation much less
easily; nevertheless, for its newly acquired voters even its image has
been heavily implanted with the immigration and asylum issue, particu-
larly since its popular initiative ‘against illegal immigration’ (actually

Extreme Right in Switzerland
509
directed against asylum-seekers), which was voted upon in December
1996 but had been launched in 1992 and submitted in 1993 with more
than 100,000 valid signatures; with 46% of the vote, it was almost
accepted on an above-average turnout of 47%.
During the 1960s and 1970s there had been a number of anti–
immigration or anti-foreigner initiatives, most particularly associated
with James Schwarzenbach and/or Nationale Aktion or the Schweizer-
ische Republikanische Bewegung, although the first was actually one
from the Zu¨rich Demokratische Partei that demanded a reduction in
the percentage of immigrants in the population to a maximum of 10%.
It was withdrawn in 1968 after pressure placed upon its initiators by
the Federal Assembly. In 1969 was launched what is still perhaps the
best-known of the anti-immigrant initiatives, often called ‘the Schwar-
zenbach initiative’, which was narrowly defeated in June 1970 with a
vote of 54.0% against on an unusually high turnout of 74.7%. Schwar-
zenbach had left Nationale Aktion at the end of 1970 but in 1971 the
party launched an initiative ‘against foreign incursion and over-popu-
lation of Switzerland’, which sought to limit the numbers of naturalisa-
tions and of foreigners, as well as placing restrictions on seasonal and
border workers; this was rejected in 1974. A further initiative that it
launched in 1973 sought the right of referendum concerning inter-
national treaties; this was rejected in 1977. In 1974 Schwarzenbach
tried again with an initiative seeking to reduce the foreign population
to 12.5% in ten years; this was rejected in 1977. Yet another Nationale
Aktion initiative in 1974 to limit naturalisations was rejected in 1977
and a 1973 one ‘against the selling-off of the national soil’ (directed
against foreigners wanting to buy property in Switzerland) was rejected
in 1979. In 1985 the party launched another initiative for the limitation
of immigration that was rejected in December 1988 with less than a
third of those voting being in favour.15
We now examine the present ideological character and policy posi-
tions of, in particular, the Nationale Aktion/Schweizer Demokraten and
the Autopartei/Freiheitspartei by examining their stances on a relevant
selection of significant consultative and mandatory referenda and on
popular initiatives from 1987 to the present, earlier identified as a
distinctive recent period in the growth of xenophobic politics in Swit-
zerland. We focus particularly upon the referenda and initiatives since
1987 for which the Nationale Aktion/Schweizer Demokraten, the Auto-
partei/Freiheitspartei or the Schweizerische Volkspartei took a distinc-
tive position, in contrast with all or most other political parties, in their
recommendations to voters on whether to accept or reject. These
referenda and initiatives concern not merely immigrants, foreigners and
asylum-seekers but, almost as important, several of them relate to issues
that touch upon the difficult evolving relationship between Switzerland,
as an historically neutral and non-aligned country, and the rest of
Europe (including the European Union) and the world, all in the context

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of heightened globalisation that makes retention of a non-aligned and
non-involved status increasingly difficult for a country located so stra-
tegically in the geography of western Europe. There is no doubt that,
just as many Swiss have felt offended by the critical international
attention to the country’s war record, so the more conservative sections
of the population feel correspondingly harassed by, and resentful of,
external pressures towards greater European and global involvement.
This, after all, is the country where a referendum held in March 1986
on joining the United Nations Organisation attracted positive votes
from only 24.3% of those voting.
Several of the recommendations to voters on particular referenda or
initiatives made by the Nationale Aktion/Schweizer Demokraten and
the Autopartei/Freiheitspartei make clear that the ideological profiles of
the two parties are in some respects quite divergent. Although both are
parties particularly located in the German-speaking east and north-east
of the country and both have xenophobic reputations, their social bases
are rather different. The Nationale Aktion/Schweizer Demokraten have
a much more working-class electorate, a fact that has produced
recommendations for some issues in the direction opposite to those of
the Autopartei/Freiheitspartei. The Autopartei did not, for example,
favour Nationale Aktion’s 1988 popular initiative to limit immigration.
In 1998 the Schweizer Demokraten were the only party to oppose a
Federal order on a temporary new article concerning cereals. In 1989
the Autopartei (along with the tiny right-wing, Protestant-based, Liber-
ale Partei der Schweiz) endorsed the popular initiative to insert into the
Constitution increased speed-limits, 130 km/hour on motorways and
100 km/hr in non-built-up areas; the Schweizer Demokraten were
opposed to this. In 1993 the Freiheitspartei was the only party opposing
a Federal order on firearms control. In 1994 it was the only party to
oppose a plan for needing a permit displayed on one’s windscreen in
order to drive on the country’s motorways. In 1996 it was again the
only party opposing the Federal Assembly’s counter-proposal to its own
popular initiative ‘for a nature-friendly system of agriculture’. On
occasions both the Schweizer Demokraten and the Freiheitspartei are
found to be positioned with otherwise very dissimilar ideological bed-
fellows. In 1992 they were both with the Partei der Arbeit, the former
Communist Party, and the Gru¨ne Partei der Schweiz, the Swiss Greens
(and with the tiny fringe Eidgeno¨ssisch-Demokratische Union) in their
common opposition to joining the institutions of the Bretton Woods
Agreement, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, albeit
for different reasons. In 1999 the two parties and the Partei der Arbeit
were the only ones to oppose a Federal order on a new Federal
constitution. On environmental issues, as well as ones concerning
international relations, it is also common to see Schweizer Demokraten,
the Freiheitspartei and the Greens in the same camp: for example, on
the issue of building a new Alpine rail transit, although again for

Extreme Right in Switzerland
511
different reasons. It is also noteworthy that, as we shall see, there are
occasional referendum issues that find the Schweizerische Volkspartei
also siding with the Schweizer Demokraten and the Freiheitspartei.
In order further to buttress the point made earlier about the partial
ideological distinction between the Schweizer Demokraten and the
Freiheitspartei, one may look at evidence about the positions on a
composite left-right scale of the members of the 1995–99 National
Council.16 Its components are 80 issues of economic and non-economic
liberalism on which there were parliamentary votes between 1996 and
1998; the reported scale runs from –10 (the most left-wing) to +10 (the
most right-wing). The mean score of the six Freiheitspartei members
included in the study was 8.7, that of five Schweizer Demokraten
members (including those of the Lega dei Ticinesi) was as low as 3.9,
whilst, for a further revealing comparison, the 29 Schweizerische Volk-
spartei members averaged a score of 8.2. There are clearly strong
elements of economic liberalism within the Schweizer Demokraten.
Considering the referenda and initiatives from 1987 to 1999, one
notes several further facts. The idiosyncratic status of the canton of
Ticino, largely Italian-speaking, emerges in several votes. It was the
canton least disposed to the Nationale Aktion’s negative recommenda-
tion on a 1987 consultative referendum on future national rail policy
but most disposed a year later to its popular initiative to limit immigra-
tion. Moreover, it is remarkable how on so many occasions one of the
north-east German-speaking rural cantons emerges as the most reac-
tionary in terms of its support for, or opposition to, a particular issue.
Uri and Schwyz occupy this position in several instances and, coinciden-
tally, are in the region of the country where the Schweizerische Volk-
spartei does especially well. There is a further irony perhaps in the fact
that these cantons are two of the three (along with Unterwalden) that
supposedly swore the perhaps apocryphal ‘Ru¨tli oath’ to establish the
original Swiss confederation in 1291, an event commemorated with an
annual national holiday on 1 August as the foundation of modern
Switzerland!
Three referenda that took place in 1992 deserve a special discussion
because their results, especially that of the last one in December, have
been far-reaching for Switzerland. Two referenda held in May, about
joining the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, actually
produced unexpectedly large majorities, even at just above 55% in
favour, but were then widely seen as the first stage in what should have
proven a relatively smooth and uneventful path for Switzerland to enter
into the European Union. The approval of the Federal order on joining
the European Economic Area, in the last of these referenda, was seen
beforehand as a straightforward next step in this progress. The govern-
ing parties, except the Schweizerische Volkspartei, came out strongly in
favour in the weeks before the vote. Industry, the trade unions, and
Switzerland’s banking community were equally forthright in their posi-

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tive recommendations. The Schweizer Demokraten and the Freiheitspar-
tei, along with the Greens, were the fringe parties that opposed the
move. Emboldened and encouraged by the earlier votes in May on the
Bretton Woods arrangements, many commentators clearly assumed that
the Federal order would be accepted, even if the result might be close.
There was thus considerable anguish and dismay when, on an histori-
cally high and wholly exceptional level of turnout of almost 80%, the
issue was lost, albeit narrowly—a result for which both the Schweizer
Demokraten and the Freiheitspartei did not hesitate subsequently to
attempt to take credit. A later inquest into the referendum result,
conducted by the Bundesamt fu¨r Statistik, concluded that the proposi-
tion was particularly rejected in poorer, more traditional, German-
speaking areas of the country (NZZ, 28.2.93, 1.3.93). Whatever the
reason for the outcome—and the Schweizerische Volkspartei’s stance
was undoubtedly quite pivotal—it set back, certainly by years, Switzer-
land’s still-stumbling approaches to join the European Union. Undoubt-
edly, the opponents of the measure touched a vein of isolationist and
anti-globalisation resentment that contributed to this result. It was, after
all, a period when the whole of Europe was in especial turmoil, which
could be pointed to in order to remind voters of the potential for chaos
from too close an involvement with other countries: for example, right-
wing extremist violence and the debate about changing the constitu-
tional provisions on asylum were hotly debated ongoing issues in
neighbouring Germany at that time.
The Schweizer Demokraten had also submitted a popular initiative
‘for a rational asylum policy’ in July 1992 but this was declared invalid
by the Federal Assembly. In July 1999 the Schweizerische Volkspartei,
the Schweizer Demokraten and the Freiheitspartei together launched an
initiative intended to reduce the time between the date of submission of
a popular initiative with the requisite number of valid signatures and
that upon which it is voted on (NZZ, 12.7.99).
Aspects of the social base of xenophobic politics
in Switzerland
Switzerland is a country where the canton is a particularly important
unit of political organisation and it is the case that not even the main
parties of government, including the purportedly pan-Swiss ones, put
forward candidates in every canton at National Council elections. This
diffuseness in party organisation, likely to cause difficulties to poll
respondents in being asked about certain parties in some cantons, is one
reason why political opinion-polling concerning partisan preferences
does not have quite the mesmeric influence, or the frequency, that one
sees in Austria, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and most other
west European countries. True, relatively regular polling has long been
conducted by Switzerland’s several private polling agencies, although
with far less frequency than in these other countries mentioned, and

Extreme Right in Switzerland
513
without the complementary routine publication of results in the national
press.17 There does not therefore exist quite the plenitude of data on
support for xenophobic parties, disaggregated according to market
researchers’ standard ‘facesheet’ social-base variables that one finds, for
example, in the case of the French Front National. However, the Institut
der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft fu¨r praktische Sozialforschung, based
at the Universities of Berne and of Geneva, has published regular
analyses of voting in national referenda and initiatives and in National
Council elections, based in part upon sample-survey data. Yet the level
of support for the fringe xenophobic parties has on occasion been so
low that national samples clearly fail to locate a sufficient number of
respondents willing to admit to such a preference and so to provide the
basis for reliably estimating parameters about characteristics of their
total electorates. In such a situation one must resort to the more
questionable practice of drawing individual-level inferences from aggre-
gate (or ‘ecological’) data in communities and cities where support is
relatively higher.
Survey data with very small case-bases for Nationale Aktion/Schweiz-
erische Republikanische Bewegung support show that, in the 1979 and
1983 National Council elections, this electorate was strongly male, but
findings with respect to age and occupation are so divergent between
the two elections that one suspects small-case base distortions.18 How-
ever, at that time, in the 1980s, it was incontestable that the Schweiz-
erische Volkspartei’s support was disproportionately or strongly
Protestant, middle-aged, rural and farm-based, home-owning, married
and (almost exclusively) German-speaking.19 By 1999, on the other
hand, it was younger, with a noticeable increase in support among the
very poorest, but still more Protestant and from the German-speaking
part of Switzerland, although for the last two characteristics noticeably
less so than in the 1980s (NZZ, 5.2.00, 6.2.00). A brief final note based
on the twelve districts of the city of Zu¨rich: support for Nationale
Aktion was always a particularly working-class phenomenon, being
distinctive in districts with a strong manual-worker presence. On the
other hand, support for the Autopartei when it emerged was distributed
more diffusely in geographical terms, a pattern that continued in Zu¨rich
after the party’s metamorphosis into the Freiheitspartei.
Conclusions for the future
With the traditional xenophobic parties of Switzerland in disarray, with
the neo-nazi fringe groups having little realistic chance of any sort of
significance or breakthrough (despite a suggestion of recent greater
strength), and with the mainstream Schweizerische Volkspartei having
co-opted the immigration/asylum issue, what then may the future hold
for organised political xenophobia in Switzerland?
One scenario would hypothesise the collapse of the four-party coali-
tion that has governed the country since 1959. This is improbable, but

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not wholly impossible. In March 2000 the Sozialdemokratische Partei
der Schweiz announced that it wanted to force the breakdown of
meetings between the government parties scheduled for May 2000 by
staying away from them, pending the withdrawal of remarks by Blocher
about alleged totalitarian similarities between the Social Democrats and
fascism, and it was being reported that the total lack of common
ground between the Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz and the
Schweizerische Volkspartei did pose problems for the governing concor-
dance (NZZ, 15.3.00). However, notwithstanding this, one is somehow
sure that some compromise will prove inevitable, since all the partici-
pating parties have apparently become too accustomed to government
seriously to contemplate break-up. In any case, the coalition has sur-
vived previous differences between its members; the Schweizerische
Volkspartei, alone of the four, counselled ‘no’ in the December 1992
referendum on entry to the European Economic Area, but the coalition
lived on. Moreover, the Schweizerische Volkspartei itself is far from
monolithic; its Zu¨rich wing, led by Blocher, is more intransigent and
non-conciliatory than sections of the party in some other cantons, a fact
that has itself caused internal party wrangles and disagreement.
Were the Schweizerische Volkspartei to choose to leave the coalition,
or to be excluded from it, it might well—buttressed by right-wing
xenophobia—cultivate the ‘outsider’ status held by Austria’s Freiheitli-
¨
che Partei Osterreichs until its participation in a governing coalition.
With almost a quarter of the national vote, the Schweizerische Volk-
spartei might be successful in this. However, Switzerland is not Austria
and the hypothesising of some trans-Alpine extreme-right surge is far
from the mark. It now (in late March 2000) looks most probable that
the Schweizerische Volkspartei will continue in the government, keeping
it ‘on its toes’ on immigration and asylum-related issues. The fact that
the Schweizerische Volkspartei has long been a governing party, as well
as Switzerland’s non-combatant status during the war and the fact that,
unlike Austria, it did not embrace the Third Reich and produce a
substantial proportion of the latter’s most notorious figures, undoubt-
edly explain why Blocher’s success for the Schweizerische Volkspartei
in the 1999 National Council elections occasioned merely a short-lived
frisson of slightly concerned international scrutiny, and none of the
opprobrium and obloquy heaped upon Jo¨rg Haider and his party when
¨
they entered Austria’s governing coalition with the Osterreichische
Volkspartei at the beginning of February 2000.
On that basis, the smaller and traditional xenophobic parties do face
oblivion and extinction, despite their presence with varying degrees of
salience during forty years of Swiss politics. Indeed, recent developments
in Switzerland represent a routinisation of genteel xenophobia that
promises greater long-term viability for the phenomenon than its fringe
and ephemeral manifestations during the second half of the twentieth
century. Political science is littered with the skeletons of fringe parties

Extreme Right in Switzerland
515
that blossomed and spluttered, failing to break into the mainstream.
Mainstream parties, on the other hand, usually prove themselves much
better long-term survivors.
The emergence to international prominence in 1999 of the Schweiz-
erische Volkspartei as a clearly xenophobic party achieving electoral
success on that basis led to its rather sudden reclassification by some
commentators as an ‘extreme-right’ party; this has led to the bizarre
outcome in certain ‘league tables’ of west European right-wing extrem-
ism of Switzerland’s having previously been relatively low in this league
(based on its recent reduced level of support for the Schweizer Demok-
raten and the Freiheitspartei) to its being in sudden contention for prime
spot, along with Austria, merely through this belated political reclassi-
fication of the Schweizerische Volkspartei. However, even if, perhaps
overreacting, the Council of Europe has in a recent report on extremist
parties and movements in Europe characterised the Schweizerische
Volkspartei as ‘extremist’ because of its ‘xenophobic tendency’ (NZZ,
10.2.00), one may dispute the appropriateness of the ‘extreme right’
epithet. The party undoubtedly has its unsavoury aspects, but to equate
it by such a labelling exercise in effect with, say, the French Front
National or the German Deutsche Volksunion would be inaccurate and
simplistic. After all, this is Switzerland: land of the cuckoo clock, not
the Borgias!
1
2
P.L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon, Elsevier, 1981, pp. 193–7.
M.B. Clinard, Cities with Little Crime: The Case of Switzerland, Cambridge University Press, 1978;
however, see also F. Balvig, The Snow-white Image: The Hidden Reality of Crime in Switzerland,
Oxford University Press, 1988.
3
4
Parties’ names are, where possible, their versions in the language with which they are particularly
associated, although most have standard (if sometimes little-used) names in the other national
languages. The genuinely pan-Swiss parties have been cited using the German version of their names.
M. Frisch, Preface in A.J. Seiler (ed.), Siamo Italiani—Die Italiener: Gespra¨che mit italienischen
Gastarbeitern, E.V.Z.-Verlag, 1965, p. 7.
5
6
A.A. Ha¨sler, Das Boot ist voll: Die Schweiz und die Flu¨chtlinge, 1933–1945, Ex Libris Verlag, 1967.
C. Cantini, Les Ultras: Extreˆme droite et droite Extreˆme en Suisse—les Mouvements et la Presse de
1921 a` 1991, Editions d’en bas, 1992, p. 16.
7
For comprehensive histories of the Nationale Front, see B. Glaus, Die Nationale Front: Eine Schweizer
Faschistische Bewegung, 1930–1940, Benziger Verlag, 1969; and W. Wolf, Faschismus in der Schweiz:
Die Geschichte der Frontenbewegungen in der deutschen Schweiz, 1930–1945, Flamberg Verlag, 1969.
R. Zeller, Emil Sonderegger: Vom Generalstabchef zum Frontenfu¨hrer, Verlag Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung,
1999.
8
9
´
R. Joseph, L’Union Nationale, 1932–1939: Un Fascisme en Suisse Romande, Editions de la Baconnie`re,
1975.
10 See K. Urner, Die Schweiz muss noch geschluckt werden!: Hitlers Aktionspla¨ne gegen die Schweiz—
Zwei Studien zur Bedrohungslage der Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Verlag Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung,
1990, esp. pp. 13–84.
11 See U. Altermatt and H. Kriesi (eds), Rechtsextremismus in der Schweiz: Organisationen und
Radikalisierung in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren, Verlag Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung, 1995. Although
there have been numerous such movements, their existence is often ephemeral. The Patriotische Front,
for example, was much in the news in late 1980s, when some of its activists attacked asylum-seekers’
hostels; by 1995 it had ceased to be significant. However, some locations, such as Winterthur in Zu¨rich
canton, do have a continuing reputation for extreme-right activism and skinhead presence. According
to the Federal Chief of Police, the neo-nazi scene in Switzerland has grown from a core of 300

516
Parliamentary Affairs
individuals in 1997 to 500 in 1999 and has become more violent (Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung (NZZ),
19.7.99). These small and often violent non-electoral groups and movements are not, however, the
principal subject of this article.
12 V. Bory, Dehors!: De la chasse aux Italiens a` la peur des refugie´s, 1896–1986, Pierre-Marcel Favre,
1987, pp. 21–42.
13 M. Janowitz, ‘Patterns of Collective Violence’ in H.D. Graham and T.R. Gurr (eds), Violence in
America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, a Report submitted to the National Commission
on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Sage r.e, 1979, pp. 261–86.
14 The last word, so to speak, on the etymology and uses of this repulsive Unwort is to be found in C.
Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus, Walter de Gruyter, 1998, pp. 615–17. The first
mention of the word in a German-English dictionary is probably that in the revised ‘Breul’, although
the meanings given (‘passing into the hands of foreigners, monopolization by foreign concerns’) are
partial and sanitised; see K. Breul, Cassell’s German and English Dictionary, revised and enlarged by
J.H. Lepper and R. Kottenhahn, Cassell 1e, 1940, p. 613. It is part of German linguistic practice to use
¨
the ‘Uber’-prefix for, among many other purposes, ethnic or nationalist slurs. Early nineteenth-century
German even contained the now mercifully obsolete ‘u¨berju¨deln’, meaning ‘to cheat’. The ethnic insult
is self-evident. See J.H. Kaltschmidt, A New and Complete Dictionary of the English and German
Languages, Druck und Verlag von Karl Tauchnitz, 1837, p. 418, or Flu¨gel’s Complete Dictionary of
the German and English Languages, adapted by C.A. Feiling and A. Heimann, Part II, Whittaker 3e,
1845, p. 619.
15 For these anti-foreigner initiatives see, for example, Bory, op. cit., pp. 57–8.
16 B. Jeitziner and T. Hohl, ‘Die konkreten Positionen von Parlamentariern in Zahlen: Ratings als Mittel
der Transparenz in der Politik’, NZZ, 8.10.99, p. 27.
17 Quarterly polling is the norm, rather than the monthly time-series of such polling in many other
countries; before the 1999 National Council elections there was some publicity about poll findings
(see, e.g. NZZ, 7.10.99).
18 See H.-P. Hertig, Analyse der Nationalratswahlen 1979 (Schweizerische Gesellschaft fu¨r Praktische
Sozialforschung, Universita¨t Bern, 11, May 1980), p. 12, and C. Longchamp, Analyse der Nationalrat-
swahlen 1983 (Schweizerische Gesellschaft fu¨r Praktische Sozialforschung, Universita¨t Bern, 20, June
1984), p. 12. The complementary 1987 publication contains no such small-case base analyses; see
C. Longchamp, Analyse der Nationalratswahlen 1987 (Schweizerische Gesellschaft fu¨r Praktische
Sozialforschung, Universita¨t Bern, 33, February 1988).
19 Ibid., pp. 22–3.