The conservative Swiss People’s Party has announced that a petition to ensure the country’s population does not exceed 10 million before 2050 has crossed the 100,000-signature threshold needed to initiate a nationwide referendum.
Party representative and member of the Swiss National Assembly Thomas Matter was quick to trumpet his party’s success gathering 110,000 signatures in record time—almost a year ahead of the final deadline to do so.
The petition advocates for a new clause to be inserted into the Swiss constitution calling for “sustainable population development” and increased powers for authorities to clamp down on asylum claims should Switzerland cross the nine-and-a-half million mark.
The Swiss population is currently 8.7 million, approximately 20% of which is foreign-born. The country accepts 30,000 asylum applications per year.
Matter was scathing of his country’s current handling of migration and asylum issues, saying that migration and a resulting “population explosion” was the defining issue facing Switzerland today.
“The issue of migration is on everyone’s lips. Since 2002, Switzerland’s population has increased by 1.5 million. In 2022 alone, including Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers, more than 180,000 people were added. We cannot sustain such growth if we want to preserve our beautiful Switzerland,” the politician told the Swiss German-language newspaper Blick.
Matter added that the Swiss foreign ministry had “transformed itself into a satellite of Brussels, which defends the interests of the EU instead of those of Switzerland,” despite Switzerland not being an EU member.
The Swiss People’s Party is currently leading the polls by a wide margin after scoring a major political victory in last October’s elections on a stridently anti-immigration ticket. Alongside the referendum plans, the People’s Party is also campaigning to clamp down on benefits and legal loopholes for asylum seekers.
Constitutional referendums also known as “Popular initiatives” are common in Swiss politics and occur when citizen groups or parties are able to gather 100,000 signatures within 18 months requiring unanimous backing from all 26 cantons. One was famously used to ban minarets in 2009.
As with the rest of Europe, migration-related issues have been rising up the agenda in Switzerland. Swiss police only last week shot dead an axe-wielding Iranian asylum seeker who had taken 15 hostages on a train passing through the rural town of Essert-sous-Champvent.
Despite passing by a popular majority in 2014, a similar referendum on migration was effectively sabotaged by a combination of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court and the central government. Matter and the People’s Party are keen for the new initiative not to repeat the past failures.
