Mais au contraire mon ami. They are not English,. Therefore they are foreigners

you mean like this?


Propaganda in and of itself is neither good nor bad.

Kosovars is correct actually, it was 2 brothers.

Variously, dont forget that under the treaty the founded Switzerland they are forbidden from providing mercenaries, or taking part in any other military action other than in their own self defence.

IIRC when the borders were settled after the Napolonic period the Swiss gave up parts of the Compte, parts of the Savoy, Fricktal was split by the Rhine and substantial parts of the Tyrol were given up. In the case of the latter, I imagine that there are parts of the Northern League who would embrace rejoining the grey league.

There is also a big democratic problem in Europe where if you know how the parties select candidates and are elected there is little chance for a Mr Smith goes to Strasbourg Scenario. Since the European Commission is appointed and staffed without any elections then one can understand why a highly democratic Swiss person would rail from it. Add to that the fact that the rather corrupt (I worked in Politics for a long time Greek Olive trade anyone?) EU, that cannot even get its accounts signed off for two decades, has a rather nasty smell to those people who like to hold their representitives to account.

The SVP in my observation is a reaction to the attempts by those who want a permanant politcial class, drinking at the fountains of wealth in Brussels and Strasbourg, and would need to give up all vestiges of democracy in Switzerland to get at it.

The Nazis were as socialist as The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic (only Ms Palin thinks the clue is in the name). But both the NSDAP and the SVP present themselves as the Common Man's champion, when in fact they were /are bankrolled by business interests.

If you want to split hairs - only one of them stabbed the victim. You know of course that a headline reading: "These are the consequences of uncontrolled mass immigration: KOSOVARS SLASH SWISS!" does not even purport to be about the incident in question. It is about creating the sentiment that all Kosovars in Switzerland are knife-wielding madmen, who - once let loose - will stab you, and your children, and old Mrs. von Flüe who lives round the corner. Which is great, because it gives you a convenient scapegoat to blame if your other policies don't work.

And this is also why people who dare to suggest that actually most of the time foreigners behave and most folks (Swiss and foreign) get along well, like the ex-mayor of Spreitenbach, must be gotten rid of. In that respect - the aim to create a sort of "permanent state of emergency" where the sheer survival of the country is seemingly at stake all of the time, and where it can only be saved through drastic measures, the SVP way of politics is very much like the NSDAP one.

Very true.

Seriously? You honestly believe that? You're more gullible to left-wing propaganda than I thought.
They're no more extreme than the Tories in the UK, are they all Nazis too? You also have to realise that the UDC "over here" is far more moderate than that in the Zürich area. I'm not a huge fan of there poster campaigns, tehy do appeal to the lowest common denominator, but anyone with a ounce of intelligence can see right through the fact they are designed to create debate and uproar; it puts the SVP on everyone's lips. Would I vote for them? No, I don't agree with some of their social policies nor their overt electioneering, I'm more of a FDP/BDP man myself

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Stealing jokes off the internet and passing them off as my own since 1995

That's as may be, but I'm talking SVP, not wishy-washy french speaking closet-europhile foreigner-hugging UDC. That part of SVP (ie most of the Grisons section) has left the party and is now known as BDP.

If you want to compare to the UK, FDP is what is closest to the Conservative Party. SVP is somewhere between UKIP and BNP.

spot on, I couldn't have expressed it better myself

The UDC is still very much alive and kicking in Swiss-Romande, the BDP, in fact, is still an up-and-coming minority party here at the moment.
The UKIP is essentially a single-issue (ie out of EU) political movement and if you read the BNP manifesto, they are basically a socialist anti-corporatism party with an anti-immigration slant.

So the SVP sits somewhere in the middle.

BTW the BNP has an anti-immigration "slant"? Their official party line is that immigration must be "halted and reversed as it presents one of the most deadly threats yet to the survival of our nation", although the former position (repatrialtion of all foreigners or naturalised Britons) was ditched when Nick Griffith became party leader.

you mean pro-corporatism but anti-corporation?

You can't really compare parties one to one as the Conservatives are larger and broader than any of the Swiss parties. They stretch from the right fringe of the CVP across the FDP and BDP and to at least two thirds of the SVP.

The last third of the SVP is in roughly the same water as the UKIP

PNOS and SD are the Swiss equivalents of BNP. They have nothing to do with the SVP, taking a much more socialist stance.

Fortunately a clear majority of 72% have a more sane & sensible view.

You cannot really do any comparison with UK because there are so many Swiss parties who consequently have great difficulty in differentiating themselves & their policies from each other.
It is hard enough in the UK for the third party (Liberals) to differentiate themselves from the main two; here it is a matter of fine degrees of difference & shades of opinion.