There’s just no escaping immigration as an issue, with far-right parties continuing to exploit racist and nativist sentiment for their own ends – as Australian readers will be well aware. But there was good news last Sunday from Switzerland, with an anti-immigration referendum initiative going down to defeat.
The proposal, promoted by the far-right Swiss People’s Party, was to cap the country’s population at ten million (it’s currently about 9.1 million). But the point, of course, was not to suggest that Swiss women should have fewer babies, but rather to curb immigration, and particularly non-white immigration. It’s characteristic of Switzerland’s political system that this debate, which in other countries would mostly be fought out at election time, often takes the form of referendum campaigns.
Swiss voters have a mixed record on this sort of thing. The last time there was an anti-immigrant proposal on the ballot was the “burqa ban” of 2021, which was approved only narrowly with 51.2% in favor. But in 2017, in the vote that prompted the first version of this headline, a healthy 60.4% voted to ease naturalisation requirements for the descendants of immigrants. This time, opinion polls had suggested that the vote would be close.
In fact it was reasonably clear: 54.8% voted “No”, as did majorities in 14 of the 26 cantons. As usual, the French-speaking part of the country was more liberal, but even in the German-speaking areas it was rejected by 53.0%. Turnout was 58.9%, the highest since a Covid-related referendum in 2021.
So Switzerland’s population is free to grow beyond the ten million mark. With its roughly 4,000 square kilometres of arable land, as compared to about 310,000 square kilometres in Australia, that’s the equivalent of an Australian population of around 775 million – not a bad figure to keep in mind the next time someone tries to tell you Australia is overcrowded.
The World is Not Enough 