The Right is on a roll in Switzerland.
In Sunday’s parliamentary elections, the national-conservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP), Switzerland’s biggest political party for over a decade, surged, increasing its share of the vote to 28.6%, three percentage points higher than the last election in 2019.
According to the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, given the SVP’s better-than-expected result, the party is set to gain an additional 9 seats in the country’s lower house of parliament, amounting to an impressive total of 62 out of 200.
In what constitutes a major defeat, the Greens lost five seats, while the other leftist—still second-largest—party, the Swiss Socialist Party (SP), gained two.
The Christian Democratic Die Mitte narrowly took over from the liberal FDP as the third-largest party, gaining 1 seat (29), while the latter lost one (28).
SVP, SP, FDP, and Die Mitte have all long been part of Switzerland’s coalition government, the make-up of which is unlikely to change.
For the SVP, which has held the most parliamentary seats since 1999, betting on the electorate’s valid concerns about mass migration—it campaigned on better border controls and a stricter deportation policy for rejected asylum seekers—and woke politics paid dividends.
“We have problems with immigration, illegal immigrants, and problems with the security of energy supply [following the loss of Russia as Switzerland’s gas supplier],” said SVP leader Marco Chiesa. “We already have asylum chaos … [the possibility of] a population of 10 million people [currently at 8.7 million] in Switzerland is a topic we really have to solve.”
Speaking to 20 Minuten, he said that the people “were fed up.”
The people had spoken since a “course correction” was “urgently needed,” declared SVP’s Vice President Marcel Dettling.
The average Swiss household can expect to see electricity costs double next year when the grid operator will start charging them for the cost of maintaining winter reserves.
Partly to solve Switzerland’s energy problems, the party proposes a lessening—or outright reversal—of sanctions on Russia which, momentarily dropping its famed neutrality, the country had aligned itself with the EU bloc on.
A eurosceptic party, the SVP is equally keen on keeping the EU at arm’s length. Given the increasingly precarious security situation in Europe, the party favors curbing social spending and developmental aid to bolster its military, as it is not a member of NATO
Summarizing the current mood in Switzerland, Michael Hermann, a political analyst at pollsters Sotomo, was quoted by Reuters as saying:
The progressive zeitgeist of four years ago has disappeared. After four years of crises, with coronavirus and Ukraine, people are more conservative than they were in 2019.
While 5.5 million Swiss are eligible to vote, barely 46% turned up (in Switzerland, voting is not mandatory). One reason for many Swiss opting for a pass is that they have ample opportunity to make themselves heard on numerous issues through referendums, held four times each year.
