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Swiss Immigration Vote Raises Alarm Across Europe Swiss Vote Seen as Sign of Far Right’s Power in Europe
(about 11 hours later)
BERLIN — Swiss and European leaders reacted warily on Monday to Swiss voters’ narrow approval of a proposal to limit the number of foreigners allowed to live and work in Switzerland. LONDON — European officials warned Switzerland on Monday that it would pay a steep price for its vote to limit the flow of workers across its borders, but many also acknowledged that far-right parties were beginning to reshape politics and policy across the Continent.
A bare majority voted in a referendum on Sunday to cut immigration quotas and require that Swiss nationals be given priority in hiring. The result could have far-reaching implications for relations between Switzerland and the 28-member European Union, of which it is not a member. The Swiss vote on Sunday posed a direct challenge to the free movement of people, a key pillar to the whole edifice of the European Union. It followed a surprising show of strength at the polls by a wide range of groups, ranging from nationalist politicians in Britain, France and the Netherlands to anti-Semites in Hungary and a neo-fascist movement in Greece, that treat some European ideals as a threat to their freedom and prosperity.
Laurent Fabius, France’s foreign minister, said Monday that the European Union would have to reconsider its relationship with Switzerland. The big test of populist power will be in May, when anti-immigrant and euroskeptic parties are campaigning vigorously to take seats in the European Parliament, seeking to form a block in the legislature that aims to roll back integration and taxation in Europe.
“It is a vote that causes concern because it means that Switzerland wants to withdraw into itself,” Mr. Fabius told RTL radio. Daniela Schwarzer, a German expert on the European Union with the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said that “freedom of movement has become a subject of worry” for Europeans. “The result of the referendum will have a strong impact on the euroskeptic parties,” she said.
Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, told the BBC that Switzerland could not “pick and choose” among its agreements with the bloc, adding, “it is a whole package they have signed up to.” She said that the Swiss government must now explain how it intends to apply the results of the referendum. Just last month, workers from Romania and Bulgaria became the latest among those living in European Union member states to have the right to migrate and work anywhere inside the bloc, a development that contributed to the backlash against the open-borders rules.
That warning was echoed by other European officials. “We have been extremely clear about what it means to have free movement of people as part of our overall agreement with Switzerland, and we have established that this is an initiative that does run counter to the principle of free movement of people between the European Union and Switzerland,” Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, told reporters in Brussels on Monday. She added, “so now what we will have to do is judge the consequences of this for our relations with Switzerland.” Days before the Swiss vote, Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Dutch politician, issued a report he commissioned from a London consulting firm trying to show that the Netherlands would be better off leaving the European Union. While there has been criticism of the study, carried out by Capital Economics, Mr. Wilders has turned his party’s emphasis from opposition to Islam to opposition to the European Union, and his Party for Freedom is likely to elect the largest number of European legislators from the Netherlands.
She stressed that free movement was an element of the bilateral agreements with Switzerland, adding that any breach of the principle “will have implications in our relations with Switzerland.” A decision by the Netherlands to exit the European Union would mean that “we no longer have to pay billions to Brussels and weak southern European countries, that we can save billions by liberating ourselves from European Union regulations,” Mr. Wilders said in The Hague. “That we can end the mass immigration and stop paying welfare checks to, for instance, the Bulgarians and the Romanians.”
While staying outside the European Union, Switzerland, which is surrounded by countries that are members of the bloc, has opted to increase cooperation with the bloc. Its ties are governed by around 100 bilateral agreements, based on a free trade deal struck in 1972. That leaves it potentially vulnerable to retaliation from the bloc. Eamon Gilmore, the Irish foreign minister, said that there was a “growth in the extreme right agenda” across the European Union and that it was “quite xenophobic.” He said the vote would pose “major difficulties” for freedom of movement, which is a “cornerstone of what the E.U. is all about.”
European Union foreign ministers were expected to meet on Monday in Brussels and were expected to have further comments on the Swiss vote. The vote in Switzerland, which is not a member of the European Union but has broad agreements with Brussels, was very close, with the measure favored by just 50.3 percent of those who voted in the referendum. It gives the government three years to come up with legislation imposing immigration quotas and to negotiate with Brussels on how to manage that legislation.
In Switzerland, Simonetta Sommaruga, the justice minister, in comments Sunday to the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, called the outcome “a pivotal decision with far-reaching consequences” that reflected a growing unease about a rising population of immigrants in recent years. The vote was pushed by the far-right Swiss People’s Party, which was instrumental in a 2009 vote banning new Swiss mosques from having minarets.
Switzerland has one of the highest proportions of foreigners in Europe, amounting to about 27 percent of the country’s population of roughly eight million. Many job seekers have arrived from countries hit hard by the European economic crisis. Switzerland had agreed to its rules on freedom of movement to benefit from effective integration with Europe, including freedom of trade and movement of capital — which are all now in doubt.
In neighboring Germany, Switzerland’s largest trading partner, Wolfgang Schäuble, the pro-European finance minister, said the vote must be viewed as a signal for politicians elsewhere in Europe. Viviane Reding, the justice commissioner of the European Union, said Monday that acceptance of the single market for goods, people and capital was all or nothing. “You cannot have a single market with holes in it,” she said.
“I think that we all have to take this very seriously,” Mr. Schäuble, who has spent decades working toward tighter European integration, told the German public network ARD. “We regret this decision. It will cause a lot of difficulties for Switzerland.” Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said that the vote was bad news “both for Europe and the Swiss” and that Europe “was going to review its relations” with Switzerland.
The referendum on the changes to the country’s liberal immigration law was a rebuke to the Swiss government, the banking industry and business leaders, who had lobbied against the restrictions, warning that such a move could endanger Switzerland’s prosperity. But the challenge from Switzerland puts Brussels in a bind. The European Union must defend its founding principles or risk undermining the whole project in a way that even the euro crisis has not. But by ignoring calls to limit immigration in a period of recession, Brussels can look elitist and bureaucratic and simply feed the anti-European Union backlash that connects the various far-right populist parties of Europe.
The admonitions failed to drown out the warnings of the rightist Swiss People’s Party, which introduced the referendum, saying it was necessary if Switzerland was to retain its identity in the face of immigration. The populists, at the moment, appear to be in the driver’s seat.
Immigration has become a polarizing issue across Europe. More prosperous nations are growing worried that their welfare systems cannot handle an influx of workers from the poorer Eastern European countries and some southern member states of the European Union. Mr. Wilders of the Netherlands has formed an alliance with France’s National Front, whose leader, Marine Le Pen, has similarly switched her party’s emphasis from opposing Islam to opposing immigration and the European Union as an elite foreign power suppressing French values and nationalism.
Far-right parties with anti-immigrant platforms in France, the Netherlands and Norway have gained strength in recent years, and there have been sharp debates in Britain and Germany over limiting the number of immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania because citizens from those countries gained full access to European Union job markets this year. The National Front leads French polls for the European elections, which are founded on proportional representation, unlike the French and British domestic elections, which tend to squeeze out smaller parties.
Nationalist parties elsewhere in Europe welcomed the Swiss vote as indicative of an overall rejection of recent strides to deeply integrate the bloc by easing restrictions and allowing people to live, work and study — and also draw welfare benefits — in any member country. Various national populist parties are trying to form an electoral bloc that will give them more power in the next European Parliament, the only directly elected institution of the European Union. Besides the parties of Mr. Wilders and Ms. Le Pen, the bloc already includes Austria’s Freedom Party, Sweden’s Democrats, Italy’s Northern League and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, centered in Dutch-speaking Flanders.
“It is becoming more and more obvious to people across Europe that unfettered free movement from the poorest countries on the continent into the more advanced ones with higher living standards and welfare entitlements is unsustainable,” Britain’s U.K. Independence Party said in a statement. While they are all somewhat different, they are all appealing to nationalism, attracting those upset by immigration, Islam, economic distress and “faceless” bureaucratic dictates from Brussels. The group rejects joining with Hungary’s anti-Semitic Jobbik party or Greece’s semi-fascist Golden Dawn, which have their own anti-Brussels positions.
The center-right European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, which is the largest group there, took a tough line. But every country of the European Union, except Germany, has a substantial anti-immigrant, anti-European party, all playing on the idea that the European Union has grown too large, too powerful and too distant, and that the openness at the heart of the European experiment has gone too far, diminishing national identities and values and creating economic distress, intra-European competition for jobs and too much pressure on social services from immigrants.
“The free movement of citizens is a core principle of the E.U. Switzerland has a binding bilateral agreement with the E.U. to accept and guarantee free movement for all E.U. citizens,” said a statement by its chairman, Joseph Daul, and its vice chairman, Manfred Weber. Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party has made strong efforts to differentiate itself from the far-right alliance, arguing that its opposition to mass immigration is not extremist and that it has one prime issue at heart: British exit from the European Union, a position that has significant support from inside the Conservative Party, too.
“The E.U. also guarantees free movement for Swiss citizens. We regret that the Swiss government will have to change the country’s position on this crucial part of its relations with the E.U. There is no room for negotiations, however, and the rules cannot be changed unilaterally.” The Independence Party’s leader, Nigel Farage, said Monday, “This is wonderful news for national sovereignty and freedom lovers throughout Europe.” Striking familiar themes, he said, “A wise and strong Switzerland has stood up to the bullying and threats of the unelected bureaucrats of Brussels.”
The proposals give Switzerland three years to renegotiate its bilateral accord with the European Union on the free movement of people, or require that they be revoked entirely. The Swiss government said it would begin work immediately on drawing up a proposal to Parliament. A spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, hit the same themes, if more carefully. The Swiss vote shows “that there is growing concern around the impact that free movement can have,” said the spokesman, Jean-Christophe Gray, noting that Mr. Cameron had urged his European Union colleagues to look for ways to limit immigration, suggesting yearly quotas. “That is why the prime minister and other ministers have been raising this issue, and will continue to do so, with their counterparts across the E.U.”
Sunday’s referendum was the third time that Swiss citizens have voted on the free movement of people since May 2000, when voters approved a first bilateral deal with the European Union that included the free movement accord. Further votes were required as the bloc expanded, to include new member states as they joined. At the same time, the more that establishment parties try to co-opt anti-European and anti-immigration themes, the more credibility they provide for the parties on their right.
“We always thought the argument about jobs would win people over,” Urs Schwaller, a lawmaker with the centrist Christian People’s Party, said in an interview with the Swiss television channel SRF. “Clearly, that wasn’t enough.” European officials said Monday that they would not accept the imposition of quotas on European Union citizens and that Switzerland could lose its access to the single European market.
The Swiss vote is a reminder to the European Union of the danger of referendums on major issues. The French, considered committed pro-Europeans, shot down a European constitutional reform drafted by their former president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in 2005, as did the Dutch.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German-French European legislator, said that if France had voted on the same referendum as the Swiss, “it would have been worse, with 60 percent voting ‘yes.’ ”
The general reluctance to consult democratic voters on important changes to European structures has fed the “democratic deficit” that feeds the euroskeptic parties — and which direct elections to the European Parliament and the greater powers provided to it under the Lisbon Treaty were intended to prevent.