Switzerland's far-right Swiss People's Party (SVP) shrugged off charges of racism to register the best election showing of any single party in nearly a century, preliminary results showed Monday.
The SVP, already the country's largest party, won 29 percent of the vote and 62 seats in the 200 seat lower house, the National Council, gaining seven seats over 2003, according to the Swiss statistical office. "It's the strongest score of any party" since 1919, political scientist Hans Hirter told AFP. The SVP's aggressive campaign targeting immigration and foreign criminals included a poster featuring a black sheep being kicked out by white ones.
The Socialists, with 19.5 percent of the vote, lost nine seats, leaving them with 43, while the Radicals slumped to a record low of 15.6 percent, shedding five seats to 31. The centre-right Christian Democrats (14.6 pct), the junior partner in the four-party government, gained three seats to reach 31, the preliminary results showed. With a combined 11 percent of the vote, the Green movement surged to a total of 23 seats in the lower house, just behind the four governing parties.
Socialist parliamentarian Liliane Maury Pasquier said the SVP had profited from fears about globalisation and perceptions of growing social insecurity. "The SVP dresses all this up in xenophobic and anti-European colours. People think they are defending themselves by voting for the SVP," she told AFP.
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