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Swiss right-wing party uses Holocaust memorial in campaign against open borders

The right-wing Swiss People’s Party has apologised after using an image of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial in a campaign to prevent Switzerland from becoming ‘over concreted’ due to increased migration.

Published: 24 July 2020 11:24 CEST

Swiss right-wing party uses Holocaust memorial in campaign against open borders

Swiss People's Party (SVP) President Albert Rosti. Photo: FABRICE COFFRINI / AFP

The images, which were shared through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, have since been deleted.

The images were part of the SVP’s ‘limitation initiative’ which seeks to restrict the amount of immigration to Switzerland from the European Union.

The initiative, initially scheduled for May, was moved to September due to the coronavirus pandemic.

A spokesperson for the SVP said something “went wrong” with the post and lamented the “huge lapse”.

SVP Secretary Martin Suter told the Tagesanzeiger that the post was prepared after doing a stock image search for concrete and that nobody recognised the photograph came from the Holocaust memorial.

“We certainly didn't want to use it to provoke and fill the summer slump in the media.”

READ: Swiss right-wing party wants mandatory deportation of criminal foreigners

In a tweet released on July 24th, the party said “We made a mistake! When several posts were released internally, we were not aware of what the symbol image used was. We apologise to all people whose feelings we may have hurt with this mistake.”

Uns ist ein Fehler passiert! Bei der internen Freigabe von mehreren Posts ist uns nicht bewusst gewesen worum es sich auf dem verwendeten Symbolbild handelt. Wir entschuldigen uns bei allen Menschen, deren Gefühle wir allenfalls mit diesem Fehler verletzt haben.

— SVP Kanton Zürich (@svpzh) July 24, 2020

‘Limitation initiative’

The initiative, backed by the populist rightwing Swiss People's Party (SVP) and opposed by the government, calls for the country to revise its constitution to ensure it can autonomously handle its immigration policy.

SVP, Switzerland's largest party, has built its brand by condemning immigration as well as the influence of the European Union in non-EU-member Switzerland.

If the initiative passes, Swiss authorities would have one year to negotiate an end to its 1999 agreement with Brussels on the free movement of persons between Switzerland and the bloc.

The initiative goes even further than a similar initiative, also backed by SVP, that was voted on in February 2014. It demanded that Bern impose quotas on migration from EU countries.

That vote narrowly passed, throwing Swiss-EU relations into disarray, with Brussels warning that any curbs on immigration by EU citizens put in doubt a whole range of bilateral agreements.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The German government also decided to commemorate the Holocaust in more physical ways. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, commissioned by the Bundestag (German parliament) in 1999, was completed and opened in 2005. This controversial monument is located just one block south of the iconic Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin.

Visitors walk through the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Photo: DPA

It comprises 2,711 concrete slabs of the same width and length, but of varying heights, in a grid formation, allowing visitors to walk through the installation. The memorial has however been criticized for failing to address the suffering of the individual victims, as the monument is anonymous.

The architect who designed it, Peter Eisenman, responded that “in this monument there is no goal, no end… the duration of an individual’s experience of it grants not further understanding, since understanding is impossible”.

But beneath the memorial, there is a lesser known Information Centre, which attempts to provide a different experience. The Room of Names inside intends to “release the victims from their anonymity” by reading out biographies of Jews murdered in the Holocaust – a process which, if completed for all victims, would take over six years. The project is still collecting names and stories of the victims.

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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 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.