Blocher still pulls strings for party he boosted

Populist pontificator Christoph Blocher, known for his virulent campaigns against immigration, the European Union and Islam, is not running in Switzerland's upcoming elections, but remains the country's most talked-about politician.

Published: 14 October 2015 17:53 CEST

Blocher still pulls strings for party he boosted

Swiss People Party's Blocher at Lausanne rally. Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP

In Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne and also in smaller communities, Blocher has tirelessly been making the rounds to rally the crowds in the run-up to Switzerland's October 18th parliamentary elections.

The 75-year-old multi-billionaire, vice-president of the populist right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), can energize a crowd like no other in the country, not generally known for the charisma of its politicians.

The strong man of Switzerland's populist right has been shaking the country's tradition of moderation and consensus since he first stormed onto the national stage when he joined parliament in 1979 as an opposition figure, whipping up fears about outside threats.

The son of a Protestant preacher and the seventh of 11 children, Blocher is widely credited with bankrolling the SVP and transforming it from a rural group into a powerful political machine anchored to the hard right, and today, Switzerland's largest party.

'Eliminate the chaos'

Until the 1990s, the SVP was the smallest of Switzerland's four leading parties, with just around 10 percent of the vote, but since then it has soared to first place, taking 26.6 percent in the elections four years ago.

Blocher has helped cement SVP's brand of populist nationalism focused heavily on purported threats from immigrants, in a country where a quarter of the population are foreign nationals.

Europe's current migrant crisis has given the party an additional boost, as it warns that the so far modest numbers of migrants and refugees arriving in Switzerland are set to balloon.

Blocher says the SVP is on the only party that can solve the “asylum problem”, by tightening Switzerland's already-strict laws on the subject.

“We have a lot of people coming to Switzerland who are not real refugees…we don't have room for them,” Blocher said at a rally in Lausanne.

Other SVP members shy away from comparisons with France's far-right National Front for fear of being thought too extreme but Blocher rejects the idea for quite a different reason.

Compared to SVP, the National Front “is a left-wing party,” he told news agency AFP.

When speaking to the crowds, Blocher likes to vaunt his past business achievements, including taking over a small chemicals firm in the early 1980s and turning it into a successful international business, now run by his daughter Magdalena — one of his four children.

But he is most renowned for his political successes, including his 1986 campaign to keep Switzerland out of the United Nations — though the country did finally join in 2002.

Blocher has also rallied against closer ties with the EU, spearheading the successful 1992 campaign against Swiss membership of the European Economic Area.

And last year he helped secure a narrow referendum win ordering restrictions on immigration from the EU — upsetting relations with Switzerland's biggest trading partner.

Playing on security fears, he also took the lead in SVP's party's successful 2009 campaign to ban the building of new mosque minarets, and the push a year later to automatically expel foreigners convicted of certain crimes.

Confrontation, bluster

A lawyer by training and an admirer of Winston Churchill, the white-haired Swiss-German politician has long been known for his blustering speeches.

But when he was finally elected to join the Swiss government — the seven-member Federal Council — in 2003, he still shocked many with his confrontational style.

He was accused of not fitting into the Swiss government system, where ministers are drawn from all the major parties and are meant to seek consensus and stability.

In 2007, the Swiss parliament, which picks the government ministers, did not reelect him.

The SVP was furious and excluded its members chosen to hold the party's two allotted seats in government.

Switzerland's largest party was left out in the cold, although it managed to regain one of the seats a year later.

Blocher decried the parliament's move as anti-democratic, and in 2011, he announced he would stop “wasting my time in parliament”, and left.

He may not be running in Sunday's polls but Blocher — a born showman who struts the stage at rallies, gesticulating as he vaunts his achievements — remains the most visible face of SVP's campaign.

At the Lausanne rally, he boasted that during his four years as justice minister, the number of asylum requests to Switzerland fell from 20,000 to 10,000.

In comparison, Switzerland this year expects to receive some 30,000 asylum requests.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.