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Soriek  1yr ago (text post)   1151 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 22

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Switzerland

The Swiss federal elections occurred last Sunday. The biggest winner was the largest nationalist/populist Swiss People's Party (SVP/UDC), which rose from 53 to 62 seats out of 200 (a 17% gain). The losers were the Greens and Green Liberals, who went from a combined 44 to 33 seats (a 25% loss). The other left wing parties remained stable (the second-largest Socialist Party gained 2 seats, but the small Labour Party lost 2).

Apart from this shift to the right, in the center, the neo-liberal FDP (think: free market capitalism with gay rights and open borders) lost seats to the conservative Christian center party literally called “The Middle”. Overall, this election strikes me as a loss for liberal left and a win for the conservative right.

None of this directly affects the composition of the federal government, due to various quirks of the Swiss political system, but it's interesting to see that even in relatively conservative Switzerland, the European trend towards rightwing nationalism is clearly visible, despite the fact that Switzerland is objectively less affected by the factors that plague most other European countries, like influx of African/Middle Eastern refugees, rise in crime, and inflation.

Election results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/elections-2023--projected-results/48897354
Objective discussion of the results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/eight-takeaways-from-the-2023-federal-elections-in-switzerland/48915304

The commentary from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, arguably the most reputable newspaper of record in the country, and politically aligned with the neo-liberal center-right, strikes me as extremely salty. Archive link in German, but I'll copy/paste the Google translation (Google translate doesn't seem to work well with archive.is):

Citizens want more protection and more government - difficult times are approaching for liberals: wars, crises, high health insurance premiums. Parties that promise security won on Sunday - even if it is a false one.

The great shadow that has fallen on the world has also reached Switzerland. The war in Ukraine, inflation, geopolitical instability, refugee movements and the brutal attack on Israel are reflected in the voting results. People long for security, order and a strong state.

The Swiss People's Party promised security and won. It took her a long time to focus on the right topic. The SVP strategists tried city and country, neutrality and “gender gaga” – nothing worked. Only when they radically focused the election campaign on the issues of immigration and asylum policy did success become apparent. The first voter surveys already showed that the SVP was the only party that would make significant gains. The fact that she shamelessly mixed up the immigration of qualified specialists with asylum migration, that she scandalized a “Switzerland of ten million” as well as “foreign crime” did her no harm. On the contrary: with a voter share of almost 29 percent, it achieved the second-best result in its history.

And another party benefited on Sunday from the fact that citizens have different concerns than they did four years ago. The Social Democrats had already noticed during the pandemic that they had more success with concrete material demands than with post-material zeitgeist issues. Instead of gender equality, the SP increasingly focused on the issue of loss of purchasing power. It calls for lower rents, cheaper health insurance premiums, higher pensions, reduced daycare rates and promises simple solutions: “speculators” and the state should pay.

This calculation also worked out. While social democracy in Europe is in decline almost everywhere, the SP was able to make slight gains again. It's not much, and the gain is probably largely due to dissatisfied former voters of the Greens, but the SP is also benefiting from the trend of these elections: parties that addressed specific concerns and promised the population solutions were able to increase their share of voters .

This tendency is also clearly visible in the results from the center. Their mobilization strategy, enriched with all sorts of social-populist demands, failed. The party promises fair taxes and falling health insurance costs without explaining how such additional spending will be financed. And here too, the promise of concrete solutions worked its magic. The center only won slightly, but it won - and not only that. It achieved what had been apparent since the fall of the CS [Credit Suisse, a large Swiss bank that collapsed earlier this year]: it caught up with the liberals.

No impact on the composition of the Federal Council is expected any time soon, but elections have consequences. With two almost equally strong parties in the political center, the magic formula is coming under pressure. It states that the three largest parties should each hold two seats in the state government, while the fourth largest is entitled to one seat. But what if the third and fourth strongest parties are practically the same strength?

Under party president Thierry Burkart, the FDP [liberals] wanted to overtake the SP [socialist party], but nothing came of it. The party even lost a few tenths of a percentage point compared to 2019. In times of crisis, liberalism finds it difficult to assert itself against calls for state intervention and more law and order. The belief in free borders and free markets has suffered in recent months. This is evident in the immigration debate, in the asylum debate and in the discussion about how to deal with the defunct CS. The state also had to intervene when the big bank was taken over by competitors; the market alone couldn't fix it.

The FDP was able to more or less maintain its share of the vote, but the competition from the center and the dominance of the SVP hit the party hard. In the aftermath of the elections, party president Thierry Burkart will have to answer some critical questions: Did the party focus on the right issues and was it a match for the political parties in terms of campaigning?

Because something else has been shown in this election campaign: those who polarize win. This applies not only to the SVP and the SP, but also to the center. Gerhard Pfister copied a lot from Christoph Blocher and invented a third pole party.

The real losers in these elections, however, are the eco-parties. Although climate change remains one of the population's biggest concerns, the two parties apparently do not have the confidence to develop concrete solutions. Voters have determined that the Energy Strategy 2050 has failed. Progress in climate protection can only be achieved if compromises are sought across party lines and if green dogmas such as the ban on nuclear power plants are abandoned.

The gains of the SVP and the losses of the Greens are causing the party political majority in the National Council to move more to the right again. However, that does not automatically mean more bourgeois politics. Liberalism is emerging from these elections weakened, and personal responsibility counts less than ever. The world is burning and there is great uncertainty: parties that demand something from citizens are not in demand. Those who promise security win. Even if it's a wrong one.

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