The Swiss People’s Party, or SVP, which campaigned on an aggressively anti-immigrant ticket featuring posters that showed white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag, received about 29 percent of the vote and 61 of the 200 seats in Parliament, projections showed, up from 27 percent and 55 seats in 2003. It was comfortably ahead of the Social Democratic Party, which dropped from 23 percent of the vote to 19 percent and was projected with 43 seats, as opposed to 52 in the most recent Parliament.
Among centrist parties, the projections showed the Free Democratic Party finishing with a smaller vote and 31 seats in Parliament, 5 fewer than last time, and the Christian Democrats also with 31 seats….
If [SVP leader Christoph] Blocher, who now holds the position of justice minister, remains in the council, he is in line to become its vice chairman next year and its chairman, or Switzerland’s president, in 2009. The position has a largely symbolic role, yet it raises the prospect that the job of representing Switzerland to the outside world would fall to a politician who is hostile to the European Union and at odds with Swiss traditions of openness.
[International Herald Tribune, 21 Oct 2007]
The SVP is, apparently, a “fringe” party with no traction… that happens to have taken a plurality of the Swiss Parliament.
I remember recently reading about this and other nationalist [almost always used as a pejorative by people who really want to, but just don't have the courage to, call someone a "Nazi" (and we all know how valid arguments that end with the "N" word are) – but I just don't see anything wrong with loving your country and wanting to leave it largely the way you found it] political parties who are increasingly refusing to drink the multi-culti Kool-Aid in declining Europe. (Supposedly, these’re all the bad guys, but the foreign-born Muslims rioting because cops shot and killed a crazed attacker are – what? – misunderstood?)
Translated into American, this nationalist movement is focused first on enforcing the borders and removing criminal aliens from our country. (Make no mistake, “criminal aliens” in this particular locution includes all aliens who have come here or remain here illegally) People who understand the broader implications of mass immigration – and who know the true history of this once-great republic – have, as a second goal, reducing legal immigration to reasonable levels in proportion to the current (or some mutually agreed upon previous) ethnic makeup of America, in a merit-based way that benefits America and Americans at least as much as it benefits the prospective immigrant. Preferably, all this would be prefaced by a complete sealing of the borders and moratorium on allowing anyone to come here until all the other points were met (including getting rid of the ridiculous “anchor baby” loophole).
Don’t be stupid; the US is not a “nation of immigrants.” It is a nation founded by colonists and, later, settlers. There is not now, nor has there been for at least several decades, anything left to colonize. America is settled country.
It’s high time we started acting like it.
