Swiss head to polls amid immigrant, EU debt fears

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AFP

GENEVA - Switzerland headed to the polls Sunday to elect a new parliament, with fears over immigration and the impact of the eurozone's public debt crisis set to lean voters far-right.

With an unemployment rate of just 2.8 percent and healthy public finances and output figures, the alpine state is an island of prosperity in Europe.

Nevertheless, the far-right Swiss People's Party (SVP) appears to have struck a chord with the population through its aggressive campaign claiming that the "mass immigration" of foreigners was taking away Swiss jobs.

Voters had already received their ballot slips over two weeks ago, and with school holidays underway in many cantons, most have already cast their votes by post.

Polling stations were to remain open for a few hours on Sunday morning, with ballot boxes to be sealed by midday and sent to counting centers.

Results are set to trickle in as early as an hour later, with the small half canton of Appenzell Ausserhoden expected to announce its results at 1pm local time.

In all, 246 parliamentarians are to be elected, including 200 for the lower chamber and the remaining for the upper chamber.

A record number of candidates are standing. At 3,458, this was 10.7 percent more than the previous elections.

Analysts do not expect any surprises emerging from the polls, although they believe that a key issue will be whether the SVP manages to improve on its 2007 score of 28.8 percent.

"An important issue at stake is whether the SVP will manage to maintain its 2007 score or improve it," said Pascal Sciarini, a political analyst.

"It's a very important point because it would mark the first time that a party has surpassed the 30 percent mark in Switzerland, which has not been the case since 1919," he added.

The party's campaign this year stirred up less controversy than during the 2007 when its posters of three white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag led the UN anti-racism expert to call for the withdrawal of the posters.

Nevertheless, local prosecutors in Zurich are investigating if the party violated racial discrimination rules through newspaper advertising which detailed crimes committed by two Kosovars.

Prosecutors received the criminal complaint just a week ahead of the polls from lawyers claiming that the advert discriminated against an entire ethnic group.

Overall, however, the party's anti-immigration platform appears to have gained traction.

Opinion polls indicate that immigration is the biggest concern of the Swiss.

Kevin Wolf, a student at the University of Geneva, said ahead of the polls that for him, the country's immigration policy "doesn't work."

"It's a problem of integrating the people into our society which is different from the countries where they come from so I don't think foreigners are the problem but the immigration and the integration is the problem," he said.

Foreigners made up 22.3 percent of the country's 7.9 million people at the end of August, 2011.