Switzerland's population cap referendum

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1:36Yeah, here are a lot of people, a lot of different kind of people. It's always action, it's always action. Yeah, it feels busy, it feels lively. I mean, it is like, this is 5pm, right? So it's a shower, basically. It's a rainy afternoon in Switzerland's biggest city, Zurich, when I meet Shailene Schwery under the large clock in the central train station. OK, which way are we going? It's raining. Shailene is in her mid-twenties. She's warm and friendly, with long blonde hair and dressed in a green silk blouse with matching green sunglasses and perfectly applied makeup. And when you say that, you know, around here there's lots of different people, do you see that as a good thing?

2:22It depends what kind of, if they're willing to keep up with the rules that we have. When we meet in early June, it's just 10 days before Switzerland votes on a policy which would be a world first and could dramatically change its future, to cap the country's population to 10 million people. And everyone here seems to be talking about immigration. I wanted to meet Shailene because I've seen the videos she's been posting online campaigning to vote yes to the population cap. And for many, this referendum is about more than migration policy. It's about a feeling that Switzerland and Swiss identity is under threat.

3:09So what do you see as like the core of being Swiss, a Swiss identity? identity. I asked that myself a lot, like, what is it like to be Swiss? And I came to the conclusion that a Swiss person is just a ghost in his own country. So Swiss people get lost. And we always hear, oh, Swiss people don't say that. You have to be neutral. This is Assignment on the BBC World Service, and I'm Josephine Cassely. In the weeks leading up to the vote, I travelled to Switzerland to speak to the people championing this initiative and to find out why this country has been contemplating taking such a huge stance against migration.

3:55So this is where it happens. Yeah. This is your studio, basically. Yeah, where all the action happens. Shailene started making videos for TikTok and Instagram in March this year. They're all filmed here in her car, the phone balanced on the dashboard, Her first videos were about dating and relationships. When did you start talking about politics? I was just sitting here in the car and I was filming myself saying,

4:26I'm Swiss, I hate it, that I can't say out loud my opinion. And if I do, then I'm a racist. Right, okay. And recently, Shailene has a new topic that she's talking about. Why do you think the population should be capped at 10 million? So we have more money and resource generally for our own folks. So you think that there's too many people in Switzerland? Or there will be? Yeah, because we're so small. Switzerland is small. It's nestled between Italy, France and Germany. And its population has grown rapidly over the last 20 years. It's gone up by around 2 million people since 2002, rising from about 7 million to now just over 9 million.

5:13And the country has the second highest proportion of foreign nationals in Europe. More than a quarter of residents here are not Swiss. I'm at the Swiss Parliament in Bern and it's here that I meet Thomas Aschey. He's the parliamentary leader of the SVP or the Swiss People's Party. They're the ones that are proposing this population cap. And the Swiss People's Party is the largest party in Switzerland. It's a populist right-wing party which has been campaigning against the country's rising immigration for decades. So the problem is that the majority of the Swiss population is not really profiting from this massive immigration anymore that we're seeing today.

5:55However, in his or her daily lives, the average Swiss citizen very well feels what the effects of immigration are. We have a housing crisis. We have a problem with public transportation, which is overcrowded. We're having the problem of increasing social welfare costs. But isn't a better way to relieve those problems to come up with policies that are targeted at housing, at health care? Well, of course, one solution could be to just increase construction, to densify our housing areas. However, I do not think that the Swiss population wants that. Much of Switzerland's population growth has been concentrated in its cities like Geneva and Zurich.

6:40But it's in rural areas where opposition to immigration is most strongly felt. The mountains are rising up from the lake. The water in the lake is crystal blue. and some of the mountains even have snow on them still, even though it's very hot. I'm in Schweiz in central Switzerland and it looks like a postcard.

6:59Josephine Casserly:Yes, and you can take all the old-fashioned boats, the steamboats, and go to all around the lake. Andreas Seaholzer is a journalist at Boat, that's the local paper here. This has been his patch for 30 years. We walk along the side of the lake with his sausage dog, Oskar. So we're in central Switzerland, where Switzerland was founded. Wow. So this is the heartland of Switzerland. This is original Switzerland. Yes. Most of the people, they're proud of that old picture of Switzerland. They don't want to change. But this region has changed. 50 years ago, very poor area. We just had cows and no industrial production going on, no nothing.

7:47Switzerland is one of the richest countries in the world, but it wasn't always like this. Back in the 1800s, it was somewhere that people emigrated from, travelling to neighbouring Italy and Germany to find work. Then, after World War II, Switzerland's economy boomed, and so did its population. And then, in the mid-2000s, the country joined the Schengen Agreement with the European Union. Switzerland isn't a member of the EU, but the agreement allows free movement of workers between Switzerland and European Union countries.

8:18Josephine Casserly:And that was the second big boost, people coming in. We get in the car and drive out into the countryside. Here it looks like Switzerland 50 years ago. It really does. The houses are all made of wood planks with these shutters. They look like ski shallows. So the cows grazing by the side of the road. Yeah. Is that the sound of the cowbells? Yes. Oh, wow. You can almost smell them. Not almost. Definitely smell it.

8:49Josephine, nice to meet you. We stop at a local restaurant where Andreas knows the owner. Thank you for having us. And it's very traditionally Swiss, but all the walls and the ceilings are covered in wood panelling. And in the corner, there's a group of about eight people, all look retired, playing cards, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, having a nice time. I ask them how they'll be voting in the upcoming referendum.

9:22Bruno, the owner, is in his 50s, and he tells me that his family has been in this region for generations. Pure Swiss. Pure Swiss. It's a term that I've heard repeatedly on my trip. Shailene described herself as full Swiss or Swiss Swiss, and what they both mean is that both sides of their family, as far as they can trace, are from Switzerland, not from France or Italy or Germany, and certainly not from further afield. Is there much immigration into this area? Do you see any of the effects of immigration?

9:58Josephine Casserly:3 ,500 people live here, and the last 15 years they had 80 persons coming in. Carlo, one of the regulars here, chips in.

10:14Josephine Casserly:OK, the infrastructure in Switzerland, he says, is not built for so much people. We have not enough space in the schools. The traffic is overloaded. And where are most of the foreigners from in Switzerland? At the moment it's Ukrainians. Before we have Syrian people. Syrians. We have Afghan people. And Sudan. But most immigrants in Switzerland are not from Ukraine or Syria or Afghanistan. The majority here are from the EU, with Italians and Germans the most represented. Far fewer come from outside Europe. Overall, just under 2.5 % of people living here were born in Asia. Just under 1 % come from Ukraine.

11:05These are not huge numbers, but they do represent a changing Switzerland. For instance, the number of people living here who are from Africa is only around 1.5%. But that's a number that's risen 12-fold since the 80s. But most of the immigrants in Switzerland are from the EU. He replies, that's true, but you have to be more nuanced, because the Germans who come here have jobs. Carlo's friend Pius looks desperate to chip in.

11:39Josephine Casserly:He says that the worst war to fight is if a country fights for its own culture and to lose its own identity because of other people. Sitting here in this restaurant, which is very traditionally Swiss, it just doesn't feel like that is a war that you need to be worried about. Here there is no war because this is a different world here. Here's the only place where Switzerland is still like it was years ago. This flat is very nice. I feel like a flat of people in their 20s sharing in London would not be this nice. Back in Zurich, I'm at the home of Flavian Gousset. You're a referendum influencer.

12:32Maybe you're the only one. I'm for sure nowadays known for these videos and people know that if there is a referendum they will open my profile Like Shailene who we heard from earlier Flavien is also an influencer but on the other side of the political spectrum and in Switzerland a referendum influencer is kept busy because the Swiss vote on a lot of things So I've done 50 or 60 of these videos about totally different topics Any cause that can get 100 ,000 signatures from the population can be debated in Parliament and eventually put to a public vote. And there have been many that have asked questions around immigration and integration since the 70s, often proposed by the right-wing Swiss People's Party.

13:21What do we think about the whole image? Today, Flavien is filming his second video about the population cap referendum, urging people to vote down the proposal. This initiative says that it will solve the housing crisis and the crisis of healthcare costs and it will save nature in Switzerland. And the Swiss People's Party has a really fascinating and decades-long record of not doing anything to solve these problems and then blaming immigrants for the problems still being around. I think at the moment Switzerland should be really happy that there are that much people that want to come here to do the work they do.

14:11Because you can already see in the countries around us where the population starts to shrink or already shrinked in the last years that this causes bigger problems than any number of immigration could pose. A lot of the communications urging people to vote yes are less about overcrowding and more about a fear of cultural change. It's called Protect Switzerland. That's the name of the game, Protect Switzerland. Flavien is showing me a video game made by the Erkinger Committee. It's a conservative political action group headed up by a former Swiss People's Party parliamentarian. That's the party that proposed the 10 million population cap.

14:54This group has a very specific focus, one which has been voiced across Europe among right-wing conservative and far-right political groups. And that's concern for what they say is the growing influence of Islam. The group recently launched a video game, and in it you play a border guard and have to stop immigrants from entering the country. The scene is a kind of traditional Swiss, alpine-looking background. And you're this customs worker who's a woman, you move her across the screen. As the customs officer, your job is to hit the incoming people with your stop sign to prevent them entering the country.

15:32Now I even need to hit families with kids. So yeah, now the immigrants coming are like a lot of Muslim women with children, basically, and you're meant to stop them coming. Yeah. With each level, the threat to Switzerland gets more severe. What does this say, level four or five?

15:54Schleichende, progressing Islamisation. Okay. So they are trying to paint this picture of Switzerland converting into a Sharia state, and it has nothing at all to do with the reality. but if you repeat lies often enough, at one point they're going to stick in the mind of the people. Switzerland's conservative right and far right have for some time claimed that the influence of Islam is growing in Switzerland. In 2009, the Swiss People's Party was behind a successful initiative to ban the construction of new minarets on mosques. And then in 2021, the public voted in a referendum to ban face coverings, including burqas and niqabs, again championed by the Swiss People's Party.

16:46And when I've been talking to people here about their concerns about immigration, they often circle back to a fear of Muslim immigrants in particular and Islam.

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17:30Josephine Casserly:How did the United States build the largest soft power empire in the world with the help of some tiny metal objects. I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. To mark 250 years of the United States, we speak to Roman Mars of 99 % invisible. This soft power, this influence was an incredible invention. For more, listen to the Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:04I meet back up with Shailene, the TikToker who makes videos in her car, at a bar in the centre of Zurich. I want to understand where Shailene's negative views about immigration come from. She tells me that when she was 17, a centre to house asylum seekers opened in her village. My house is almost next to it. So always when I wanted to go home, they like evacuated the whole place. and the police was like, oh, you're not allowed to cross the streets. And I'm like, I live in this house. The topic of immigration has certainly politicised Shailene. She says she wants to stand for parliament next year for a small party that stands on a platform of free speech and has been accused of having links to the extreme right.

18:51What is this referendum really about for you? To make Switzerland green again.

19:02Yeah. I just want to protect the immigrants which want to be here in Switzerland and the Swiss people. What are you worried about for the future of Switzerland? I'm afraid that Switzerland will be a Muslim country, that we will lose everything, that we build up. I'm always thinking, so why do you come to Switzerland and do you want to change Switzerland to a Muslim country? I mean, do you really... Because I've never heard anybody say they want to change Switzerland into a Muslim country. Does anyone actually say that? Who said that?

19:47I don't think they say it out loud. It's more hidden. For example, they want to build mosques here in Switzerland. What proportion of the Swiss population is Muslim? Well, I don't know. Because I grew up in Zurich and I'm for sure most of them are here. Yeah. What do you feel like it is? I feel like it's more than 50%. In Zurich, more than 50 % of the population is Muslim. Yeah. It just feels like. I'm taken aback by this. I've only spent a few days in Zurich at this point, but certainly it doesn't seem like half the population is Muslim here. Far from it. In fact, after Shailene and I left the bar, I looked up the stats for Zurich.

20:39Around 6 % of the population is Muslim. Pretty much the same as in Switzerland as a whole. But that has grown a lot. Back in the 80s, it was less than 1%, but it rose to around 5 % by the early 2010s. And that's made up mainly of people coming from Turkey and the Balkans. Oh, wow, nice flat. It's very, very tidy. I don't like a lot of... I can see. Yeah, I can see that. The next day, I meet up with Shailene again at another very tidy Swiss apartment. I tell her what I found out about the Muslim population in Zurich, that it's 6%, not over 50%. So it's not over half. Is that surprising? Yeah, it's surprising.

21:27Doesn't that show that maybe there's a sort of fear of Muslims and of Islam, which is maybe not a fear that's based on what's really happening? And maybe it's because of how it's talked about on social media or in the press or by politicians, but it's not really based in real experiences. is it's based in fear and worry. The thing is, the experience you make, that those kind of people are more violent, doesn't make it better. I mean, it feels like you're taking some of the worst examples of what people can do, like commit crime, and then you're taking those few examples and you're then applying them to the whole group of everybody who's Muslim.

22:09And that, I mean, that is racist, isn't it? For me, it's enough to know that a group of people are willing to do something in the name of religion. I don't want to take the risk of people of other countries bringing their laws here to Switzerland. I wanted to speak to Thomas Asche about this too. He's the parliamentary leader of the right-wing Swiss People's Party, the ones who are behind the initiative to cap Switzerland's population. I told him about the misconceptions I've encountered. It seems like there are people in Switzerland who are your voters and supporters who have quite a warped impression of what immigration is in Switzerland.

22:56Because actually in reality the vast majority of people are from the EU. I think it is our task as politicians to present our facts, our arguments. So if the people have the sentiment that this growth is too fast, that they're losing their identity, that they're losing what they used to call home, then I think it's the task of the politicians to take this concerns of these citizens serious. I wonder how much your party's communications are responsible for that sentiment, because I've seen some of the imagery that you've put out around this referendum. They're images which are very racialized. They tend to represent migrants as all being from outside of Europe, when in reality it's actually a very small minority who are from outside of Europe.

23:44I'm sorry, but this is not true what you're here telling. It's not a reality. It's not a fact. Please show me those pictures that you're referring to, but it's not a fact. I can show you. Yes, please. Okay, so this is the photo that I was looking at. So this is from Instagram, but out by the SVP. I get out a photo that's been posted by the Swiss People's Party on their Instagram. It's a street which looks kind of Swiss, full of South Asian men who look like migrant workers. The slogan at the top reads, if you want Swiss jobs, vote for our initiative. And in microscopic text on the side, it states that the image is AI generated.

24:27That is not giving people an accurate representation of what immigration in Switzerland is like. If it was, it would be a street full of German people or Italians or French. No, that's not true either. I mean, obviously, in campaigns, you have to simplify messages. That's not simplification. That's just a lie. No, that's... You stop here. You sure? We can keep going. I just want to... Can I leave you out, please? Sure. Can you stop the point, please? Sure. And that was the end of that interview. Mr Ashi then escorted me out of the parliament building. They don't have the pictures to illustrate their fears.

25:14They just produce them with AI. Everyone will just think, oh no, what are all these men doing in Switzerland? I'm back with Flavien, the referendum influencer, and he's showing me around his local area. It feels super international. We passed like Sri Lankan place, Nepalese place, lots of Asian restaurants. Yeah, that's the reality. Because Swiss culture is a mix of different cultures. There's no such thing as a purely Swiss culture that has nothing to do and no relations with the outside world. We walk to a peaceful square where Flavien is going to play petanque, or boule as it's also called.