Switzerland’s international media coverage has hardly ever been so broad. All major foreign newspapers cover the events in the run-up to the elections on October 21. Even though one usually interprets such extensive coverage in the sense of “any publicity is good publicity as long as they spell the name right”, in this case, Switzerland starts getting seriously worried about its image in the world. And rightly so.

A phrase from the New York Times article sums up the misconceptions about this year’s elections and Switzerland’s (party-)political landscape nicely:

“(The Swiss People’s Party, or SVP, is) the most powerful party in Switzerland’s federal Parliament and a member of the coalition government, an extreme right-wing party.”

What is wrong with this?

First of all, the SVP is not an extreme right-wing (”rechtsextreme”) party. It is nationalist, it is conservative, but it does not step outside the boundaries of electoral politics. The SVP strongly supports the Swiss constitution, it supports democracy and is one of the most ardent defenders of popular rights and direct democracy in Switzerland. It certainly is a right-wing party with very restrictive policies regarding foreigners, asylum seekers, as well as foreign policy. You could go as far as calling it isolationist. However, it is not “extreme right-wing” (”rechtsextrem”) in an anti-constitutional, anti-democratic sense.

With its recent election campaign it probably has walked on the brink between what is politically acceptable and what is not. The UN, for instance, has criticised its advertisements as racist. However, according to Swiss law, the sheep-billboards do not constitute an act of racism, since the latter has to include discrimination based on race, ethnic group or religion. According to the public prosecution authority of the canton of Zurich, foreigners do not fall into this category. Besides, the SVP proposes to deport criminal foreigners because of their criminal offences, not because of ther nationality. However, also according to the public prosecutor in Zurich the SVP’s campaign can be considered as xenophobic, and it has certainly provoked and antagonised people, contributing to a tense and polarised climate in the run-up to the elections. Still it needs to be maintained: xenophobic ist not the same as racist. The latter is a criminal offence, the former not.

Secondly, while the SVP is the party with the highest proportion of votes, it only has a relative majority in Parliament – and even this only in one chamber, the National Council, not in the Council of States. The SVP will probably get between 26 and 28 percent of the votes and a corresponding number of seats in the National Council. This is a far cry from parties who win the majority in a first-past-the-post system, and still less than parties with a relative majority in a system with proportional representation such as Germany. So while the SVP is “the most powerful party” in one of the chambers of Parliament, it needs the votes of at least two other parties in order to win votes and pass legislation. Quite apart from that, in Switzerland’s direct democratic system, also the views of non-parliamentary actors have to be taken into account in the consultation process that is an institutionalised part of the legislative process in Switzerland. And of course in the end all laws can be challenged and vetoed by the people themselves when a referendum is called. So the idea of the SVP being the “most powerful party” really has to be put into perspective.

Lastly, yes, the SVP is a member of the Swiss federal government. However, to call it a “coalition government” is misleading, especially if this is done in the same sentence that calls the SVP “the most powerful party”. The SVP ist not the party with the most seats in the cabinet with all other parties being nothing but junior members. The SVP is one of the four parties in the seven-member Federal Council which governs the country on the basis of the principle of concordance or consensus government. There is no coalition treaty, there are no senior or junior members, there is no prime minister, and to understand Swiss politics, the nature of concordance has to be understood.

This is not to say that the international media should not criticize what it might consider a politically-incorrect campaign by one of Switzerland’s five major parties – on the contrary. However, it has the obligation to convey to its readers what really is at stake in Switzerland. Most articles on the Swiss elections convey a picture of Switzerland that contrasts nicely with its usual image of a peaceful mountain-resort. However, while Switzerland is a country that is confronted with many of the internal as well as foreign-policy problems that other Western(-European) countries face, and this perhaps surprisingly so for some international observers who hiterhto have not taken a closer look at Switzerland, it is not a country on the brink of being governed by a extreme-right wing party with overwhelming popular support.

We do not yet know the outcome of the elections on October 21. However, at least according to the latest polls no shift to the right can be observed in Swiss politics. The SVP gained a few votes, that it true, however, at least in the last survey before the elections the Green party was the real winner.