Political Gnomes

Ask most people about the Swiss and they’ll have little to say. They may describe them with so many vacant words such as “neutral”, “impartial” or “dispassionate.”
The only memorable quote about the Swiss which comes to mind, only serves to confirm this point. Orson Welles (left) as Harry Lime in the film 'The Third Man', said, “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Perhaps the Swiss are now seeking to throw off those shackles of conformity and anonymity by making collective judgements about important social issues. Unfortunately, among their first forays into the maelstrom of simply-having-an-opinion, has shown them to be, at best, intolerant and at worst thoroughly Islamaphobic.

Swiss democracy is certainly a one-off, besides the usual cycle of elections, they hold a series of referenda on all manner of domestic subjects, as wide as voting rights and drug-injecting rooms. The latest poll across the Cantons, was an inflammatory suggestion there should be a ban on building minarets anywhere in the country. As there are currently only four, it would be hard to see the justification of surging Islamic culture threatening the Swiss orthodoxy. Rather it is demonstrative of an intolerant attitude of the right-wing establishment against the country’s sizeable 40,000 Muslim population.

Martin Baltisser, general secretary of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) said as much himself: "This was a vote against minarets as symbols of Islamic power." It is hardly surprising incidents of vandalism and violence around the country’s handful of Mosques have risen sharply.

Certainly the tension between Christian and Islamic peoples, countries and groups is the most significant source of international conflict in the world today. But this expression of small-minded, central European parochialism only feeds further alienation and intolerance. Recent SVP election posters included one where a few white sheep expelled a black sheep from their group - it is hard to imagine a more crass and naive appeal to bigotory outside of an openly racist political party.

The Swiss must have known denying any group religious freedom contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights or do the puffed up political dwarfs think their contempt for outsiders trumps these treaties? We, in the rest of Europe, drew up these inalienable rights after suffering the turmoil of two terrible wars. Then again, that redemption from conflict is something the Swiss know nothing about.