I waited long enough to write about Kein 10-Millionen Schweiz that I get to do so in the past tense, with a sense of relief, albeit incomplete. Yes, dear reader, the Swiss People’s Party ran yet another Schwarzenbach referendum to attempt to create their little island without resorting to kinetics, and despite some fear based on early polling numbers that maybe this time they’d managed to do it, with a campaign that tried (but ultimately failed) to break from their explicitly fascist house style (in the sense of “blame foreigners for everything, including the traffic caused by your own love of cars, and do it mostly with red, white, and black ink”), we will once again not be Doing A Swexit.
This time around, the initiative was phrased in less openly xenophobic terms, at least before the ad campaign amped up: Nachhaltigkeitsinitiative1: bewahren, was wir lieben2. The marketing was designed to be harder to disagree with on its face. Indeed, the international press that did pick up on the initiative focused more on the sustainability aspects of it: a landlocked country that’s already pretty uniformly settled across its arable land talking about capping its population is an interesting retort to the doctrine of Infinite Growth Forever.
Indeed, the proposed Article 73a to be amended to the Constitution seems perfectly reasonable on first glance. But, as usual, dig into the actual text of the initiative and there it is in the “temporary provisions” of Article 197:
Ist der Grenzwert gemäss Artikel 73a Absatz 1 nach Ablauf von zwei Jahren seit seiner erstmaligen Überschreitung noch nicht wieder eingehalten und konnten bis dahin keine Ausnahme- oder Schutzklauseln ausgehandelt oder angerufen werden, mit denen die Einhaltung des Grenzwertes gemäss Artikel 73a Absatz 1 erreicht wird, so ist auch das Abkommen vom 21. Juni 19995 zwischen der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft einerseits und der Europäischen Gemeinschaft und ihren Mitgliedstaaten andererseits über die Freizügigkeit (Personenfreizügigkeitsabkommen) auf den nächstmöglichen Termin zu kündigen."
Should the population exceed the limit in Article 73a clause 1 for more than two years continuously, and no exception to the agreement that would bring the population back under the limit can be applied at that time, then the agreement of 21 June 1999 between the Swiss Confederation and the European Union and its member states concerning the freedom of movement of persons must be cancelled at the earliest possibility.
Or, in other words, we know we can’t get you to vote to leave the current bilateral agreements with Europe, we’ve tried every few years since before they were signed. But maybe we can get you to vote to set probably-impossible population goals that will automatically cause you to leave Europe when they are not met.
everything old is old again
I recently stood my blog back up again after a five-year abandonment. In doing so I went back and read most of the posts back to 2008. Beyond the fact that most of my fears about the state of American politics have in the meantime come to pass, the most striking thing to me was how little has changed about the SVP and the shadow it casts on Swiss politics.
This probably explains why people who have been Swiss longer than I have are much more blasé about the possibility of the SVP triggering an accidental right-wing political apocalypse: they’ve been living with pretty much the same arguments being sold by slightly different guys in slightly different suits since before I was born, and aside from that one time we accidentally banned minarets it always works out in the end3. The Schwarzenbach initiative was rejected in 1970 by pretty much the same proportion on the national level as the 10 Million was yesterday, though the geography of the result was a bit different. Given how much the talk of a city-country divide dominates recent political analysis in Switzerland, how much that has to do with the redistribution of rural versus suburban development in the intervening 56 years is an exercise left to the author (who declined to do the homework).
The SVP gets one more bite at the apple this year, though: the renegotiation and consolidation of the bilateral treaty with the EU will be put to referendum, and the finer procedural points of how exactly the treaty will be ratified — whether it requires a simple majority vote of a majority of the Stände4. While there are actual principles at play here, and this will be the subject of a future blog post, it is lost on nobody that any reasonable treaty package would sail to fairly easy approval under the former conditions, but might have it more difficult under the latter.
(1): sustainability initiative
(2): protect/maintain what we love
(3): kommt scho guët, the closest thing the Alemannic part of Switzerland has to a unifying cultural philosophy
(4): Roughly, “a majority of the 23 cantons”, except that six of these count as half-cantons, for historical reasons.