Actually, the SVP never gave permission to use its posters and even threatened legal action, forcing the NPD to stop using this poster.

So in a nutshell we have a professional farmer asking us not to grow the economy further. I'm pleased he's sufficiently subsidised to have adequate income and time for politics.

OK so no more foreigners coming on holiday or working here locally.

And no more subsidies for farmers (as there'll be less people to feed, so let farms go bankrupt). Hr. Brunner can join the Grünliberale now

Just a thought, who'll do all the work performed by the foreigners now?

Isn't there a link with the low taxes and farmer subsidies the SVP loves and additional economic capacity and personal/corporate taxes brought by those pesky foreigners?

Which is not the point. If Neo-Nazis around the world love your posters and copy them... then you should sit back and think for a second if the designs are possibly a bit strong, no?

I love the fact that the guy who invented all the posters is
a) a Ausländer himself
b) has adopted two children from Africa (!)
c) Was member of the SDAJ (socialist German workers youth), a so extreme left organisation that it is connected to left terror and vandalism...

http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/schweiz/...story/29821806

Well, as per the SVP, apparently every problem is caused by foreigners, therefore i would really hope they succeed to pass a law to kick all foreigners out and i would happily sit on my sofa and watch how Switzerland will operate and what will be the opinion of the people who supported and voted on every SVP's initiative.

Or the contrary. The international press are making the SVP out to be some sort of knuckle-dragging neo-nazi group, with umeployed semi-literate dole scroungers like Mörgeli and Blocher personally patrolling the alleyways of Zürich at night armed with baseball bats and in search of some dark skinned people they can beat to pulp. And this is not just a story that the Bild Zeitung invents. Even such serious rags as the Econmist couldn't resist but parrot that particular picture. So who is to blame if the neo-nazis of the world start thinking the SVP is their friend and start copying their campaigns in the hope of one day doing in their own countries what the SVP has acheived in Switzerland?

I'm sure that if the international press started painting the CSU in that light that it would only be a question of time that these people started parrotting the CSU's posters and campaigns (which would be very boring indeed).

Not if you have a commercial interest in your work/intellectual property being paid for multiple times. The article states he once tried to become head of Press @ the SVP but didn't speak Swiss-german.

Now he can re-sell his talents commercially.....

Goddam Germans

I don't think the NPD and FN read and were convinced by the international press that the SVP are like-minded. The parties are simply like-minded and one can easily see by comparing their manifestos and their political actions. The press just reports on the comparison.

Don't blame the press. And be careful about cause-and-effect...

I would make the bet that 99% of Neo-Nazis don't read the economist. They do not copy the posters in order to be like the SVP at all - they know who they are and what they want. They see the posters and clearly like the message as well as the professional execution of the message.

It really is simple:
1. Making a good poster is not as easy as it seems.
2. The SVP is good at making posters spreading hate against foreigners
3. Neo-Nazis have the same goal
4. Neo-Nazis copy posters

If the SVP really isn't that bad and not really as extreme as their posters make them look: Why don't they just stop producing posters which spread hate?

It's called exaggeration and all parties do it to make a point but the SVP tend to do it more and better than the others. The posters are not about hate but about creating shock value. They are about saying out loud what many people think deep down but are unable to articulate. They are pointing out in a simplistic manner that there are important topics that the political mainstream is trying to sweep under the carpet, and forcing the other parties into a debate over these topics, a debate that they wouldn't be having if nobody was pushing them into it.

The posters are therefore directed at the Swiss voters and at the other parties. They are not directed at the foreigners and if any foreigner feels hate coming out of those posters that is merely collateral damage. It is not their purpose.

This has nothing to do what the NPD are dong. I cannot think of a single example of any debate that the NPD has initiated or any case of the NPD forcing the hand of another party. The NPD doesn't play that game. Mostly they are just a poor joke. Compared to the SVP, the NPD are a bunch of incompetents. Having watched German politics for a long time now I do see certain parallel to the Switzerland of the days before the modern SVP, and I do believe that it can only be a matter of time that somebody does something similar, but I don't think the vehicle for that will be he NPD, which is much too caught up in its past. The Swiss equivalent of the NPD is the SD or PNOS or the Autopartei or whetever they are caled these days. It is not the SVP.

It is one thing to provoke discussion. A good moderator in a debate can do that.

It is another thing to promote hate.

No, they don't. The posters more often than not connect any given political topic with xenophobia. Yes, a certain level of xenophobia is natural and the SVP cashes in votes thanks to those fears. This thread is a perfect example:

- Nuclear power is a serious topic. Connecting it with "we have too many foreigners" is utter bullshit. Not an exaggeration, but plain stupid.
- The weapon initiative was a very serious topic. The SVP could have easily discussed it on a factual level and won. Even I as a progressive person would have been on their side. What did they do? Fear-mongering about "criminal foreigners with guns".
- voting rights for foreigners is a serious topic. You can easily discuss the pros and cons, especially in a country with as many foreigners as Switzerland. What does the SVP do? Fear mongering against blacks, burquas and Muslims...

Honestly, I can come up with many more examples. The SVP is not bringing up topics notbody dares to talk about - they connect any given topic to some fear of the mysterious "criminal foreigner". A cheap trick that works with the stupid low educated masses that vote for them.

Germany is fortunately too big and too diverse to have a movement like "Blochers SVP": Something fairly similar happened in Hamburg with the Schill movement, but it does not work easily on a federal level - Bavarians for example did not vote for him while being conservative. Fortunately.

Regarding the idea that SVP is only articulating what people are afraid to say, or other parties aren't willing to step up to, can someone please explain to me what the minaret issue was about? I've lived here for quite a while, and I had never heard a whisper about them until the campaign against them. There were even articles explaining where they were in the paper, because nobody knew. Did I miss something? Was there a secret revolt against tall structures that everyone was afraid to talk about?
It rather seems to me like they take issues people know very little about and twist them in order to whip up a frenzy that nearly always involves xenophobia. It's an easy target, and one doesn't need to be very intelligent to figure out that they are either the white sheep or the black sheep.
I've always thought the SVP was the sort of party that would eventually produce a campaign that would get them laughed out of politics, or they would at least be curtailed so as to avoid complete embarassment for the country. Instead they just keep on going. It blows me away, quite honestly.

that's because Schill was a punter compared to Blocher. It takes somebody who is a bit smarter than him to pull it off properly. Switzerland is more diverse than Germany. Bavarian and Hamburgian are by a stretch the same language. Ticinio-Italian and Appenzellerdeutsch are not. If you can do it in Switzerland you can do it in Germany. For me its not a question of whether but of when.

In a nutshell, the town planning committee in Langenthal approved plans to build a mosque but on the condition that it was built without a minaret. The mosque committe took it to the federal court and pleaded their freedom of religion was being compromised and the court overturned the planning decision and said they could have a minaret. The SVP is not a friend of the federal court anyway and decided that if freedom of religion could be used to overturn a commitee planning decison the somethig was amiss and decided to get even. It was about federal decisons meddling with local planning decisons. Compare this to similar cases in the USA involving conflicts between federal and state governments in which the states accuse the federal government of undermining the concept of federalism by centralising power. The SVP basically said, if you want to play that game so can we. We'll also make a federal law to undermine yours. I don't think they were intending to win, they were just intending to shock. Had they acheived a vote of over 40% that would have sent such a resounding blow to political structures that he SVP would have stood as moral victor for many years to come. But things turned dirty during the campaign with SVP posters being targetted and vandalised in a systematic way which helped the SVP cash in on the underdog bonus and claim their side of the argument was being surpressed. I think the result took even their own pundits by surprise. It was a classical case of the main political parties sticking their heads in the sand and playing the race card and hoping that would be sufficient as an argument why people should vote no.

Let's just hope there won't be a Blocher anywhere else, there are already enough problems in ther world.

Cultural identity is not just a matter of language. Switzerland as a unit is far older than Germany and any Swiss feels "Swiss" and strongly about their nation. As soon as you have a strong patriotism, it is simple to get into nationalistic waters... I have not been to any other country where the passport you have is considered as important as in Switzerland. As soon as you have a clearly defined "us" and a strong feeling that you are the greatest country in the world - you are already half the way towards right winged populists. If you know who "us" is and you know that you are great - it is pretty simple to make people believe that "they" are bad. So Switzerland is the perfect breeding ground for xenophobic propaganda - it will simply not work as well in other countries.

I will not say it doesn't, I find the current developments in France pretty worrying. But it is easier to accomplish here than elswhere. The weird thing is that Switzerland has a long history of immigration as well as emigration... Most have some family members that at least used to have a different passport at some stage - they should know better...

The main political parties playing the race card??? I'm sorry, but it was the SVP who played the race card first with those posters. They certainly did not approach the campaign with an American-style federal vs state argument. It is a bit naive to think that they were showing a burqa-clad woman just for the sake of political theater.

I must disagree. I think that everybody knew this was a federal versus local argument, aptly symbolized by a bunch of threatening minarets (almost looking like rockets) arranged on a federal flag (*). Of course the poster also had other interprtations and that ambiguity was intentional. But then the SVP cannot resist the temptation of a good wind up when they can get one.

*) which just shows that the French and German imitations just totally failed to get it, and the joke was finally on them.

Hmm, I think I know of another country that have many people who thinks they are in the greatest country in the world... and they clearly know what "US" means...

Yes. And said country has issues with SVP-like politicians which kind of proofs my point...



Besides all the rubbish she says, I find her more fun to watch than Christoph Mörgeli...