Tuesday, 02 February 2010

When the far-right Swiss People"s Party (SVP) wanted to ban minarets in Switzerland, somehow they managed to turn a xenophobic and Islamophobic campaign into a "women"s rights" agenda. But there"s no fancy, pretend-progressive way to dress up the SVP"s latest instance of xenophobia, this time targeting German residents in the city of Zurich.

The Swiss People"s Party is best-known for its anti-immigration, anti-foreigner stance, including advocacy of extreme policies such as deporting entire immigrant families if one child commits a violation of Swiss law, opposing entrance into the European Union, and spouting the typical talking point alleged by nativists worldwide that immigrants increase crime. In 2007, controversial SVP campaign posters featuring a clique of white sheep giving a black sheep the boot visually illustrated their viewpoint. After all, what"s a successful right-wing extremist party without a scapegoat?

What most bothers the SVP in this case, it seems, is all those German professors -- what it refers to as "German sleeze" -- muddying up its university halls and daring to give youth in Switzerland a good education, according to Spiegel Online International. (Although the party certainly doesn"t bother to limit its attacks to higher education instructors.) Since a form of German is the official language in Zurich, and the first language of almost 80% of residents, immigrant and native-born, the language barrier that many immigrants seeking work face is mostly moot for Germans.

Of course, it isn"t quite the professional takeover SVP portrays it as, since there are still significantly more Swiss professors, but why admit that maybe you just weren"t that strong a candidate when you can use xenophobia to blame the system? That"s essentially what one of the primary organizers of this anti-German campaign is doing, in bitterness after a German applicant was chosen for a professorship that he had applied for. Oh wait -- he claims, "It"s not about me." How convincing.

The specter of hate crimes grows more distinct as xenophobic sentiment takes hold, with Zurich police reporting that German residents have received threatening letters. One, sent to a woman who has spent the past three decades of her life living in Switzerland, read: "The bullet is waiting for you, you miserable German." Unfortunately, as with the minaret ban, this anti-German campaign seems to be moving from the far-right fringes into the mainstream, and the SVP will only amp up the rhetoric if it seems to be gaining positive attention from voters in time for next month"s municipal elections.

Photo credit: Guerin Nicolas

 

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