ABSTRACT
Switzerland’s economic success was for long heavily reliant on the labour power of a large foreign-worker population, but the country has always retained a very restrictive policy towards naturalization. During the 1930s it harboured a large number of extreme-right organizations of varying importance, often influenced by events in Germany or Italy. In that decade Switzerland was also notoriously unsympathetic to Jewish refugees from Germany. Some of the parties dissolved themselves when in 1940 there was a possibility of a German invasion of the country. Post-war, Switzerland had one of the earliest successful anti-foreigner movements in western Europe. James Schwarzenbach was the major figure in two parties opposed to so-called Überfremdung, latterly the Schweizerische Republikanische Bewegung (SRB). Since the early 1980s there have been further such movements, including support for Vigilance, an anti-foreigner movement in Geneva, but the most significant subsequent development in Swiss politics has been the hardening of its attitude towards foreigners by the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), one of the principal parties in the four-party coalition that has been the basis of the national government since 1959. With particular strength in certain German-speaking cantons, the SVP has also been associated with a number of anti-foreigner referendum initiatives. The adoption of such a policy orientation by the SVP has greatly diminished the significance of the smaller extreme-right parties. Research on the SVP’s electorate suggests that, as well as being German-based, it is disproportionately Protestant in religion, middle-aged, and rural and farm-based, although the earlier anti-foreigner movements tended to have an urban, working-class base.
