Britain will be watching Switzerland as well as the EU government very closely following Swiss election results at the weekend that saw the landlocked country impose strict immigration quotas in a 50.3% referendum win for right-wing forces.
Switzerland is not a member of the EU but has had a progressing series of agreements with the bloc that effectively have made it a de facto member. That includes free movement of peoples within the EU which the Swiss voters have now decided they will not allow.
Mark Wallace writing at the Conservative Home Blog says: “While it isn’t a withdrawal, as Switzerland has never been an EU member, we will now be able to get an inkling of how the Eurocrats might deal with a country which chooses not to be part of their project. Will they cut off their economic nose to spite their face, blocking or taxing Swiss goods and services to prove a petty political point? Or will they negotiate a new relationship so as not to lose out on Swiss business?”
The British political and business establishments have long opposed EU exit on the grounds that the EU would not negotiate a new relationship with Britain and the country would suffer economically as a result of withdrawal. Proponents of exit, including the UK Independence Party (UKIP), argue that stopping mass-immigration, which puts pressure on wages, housing, health, education, and transport is a bigger priority and that the EU would negotiate trade agreements anyway.
A statement by the European Commission said it regretted that an "initiative for the introduction of quantitative limits to immigration has been passed by this vote. This goes against the principle of free movement of persons between the EU and Switzerland. The EU will examine the implications of this initiative on EU-Swiss relations as a whole. In this context, the Federal Council's position on the result will also be taken into account."
But the Swiss media is unimpressed with the finger wagging of EU bureaucrats. Corriere del Ticinosaid "It can't go on like this, the influx of foreigners is to be restricted: defying the government, parliament, the business community, trade unions and the overwhelming majority of the political parties, the Swiss people today gave the country's economic policy a severe jolt." Meanwhile the Headline inTages Anzeiger caught the bigger picture saying: "Swiss decision puts [UK Prime Minister David] Cameron under pressure".
However the right-leaning newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote “What the verdict means for relations between Switzerland and the E.U. is completely open, but it certainly won’t be good for the economic vitality and prosperity in this country.”
What is generally missed in this comment is that people value their national identity. So whether it’s ideological lefties or pro business centre-right advocates they promote the advantages to business and a growing country. Resistance to that, as the New York Times puts it, means “such a move could endanger Switzerland’s prosperity.”
What they fail to mention is that when the country experiences depressed middle class wages, housing shortages and overcrowded multilingual & multi-religious schools its own people suffer.
Urs Schwaller, a lawmaker with the centrist Christian People’s Party, said in an interview with the Swiss television channel SRF. “We always thought the argument about jobs would win people over, clearly, that wasn’t enough.” And it shows, as usual, that the political establishment does not have the pulse of its own people.
Interestingly nobody in the EU seems to be saying that the Swiss should just be able to get on with it, and that this is their democratic choice. Switzerland is less than 2% the size of the EU or put another way this is the equivalent of Alabama no longer trading with the rest of the United States. However the uppity reaction of Brussels to the Swiss reveals they are less than happy with the result primarily because like most government progressives they don’t want to deal with the people having alternatives.
Britain will be watching closely! The referendum will empower nationalist forces in the UK to continue to push for EU reforms or the end of membership. Brussels knows that concessions to the Swiss will provide significant fodder in Britain either for the sitting Conservatives to renegotiate, or for the nationalist UKIP to point out that EU exit doesn’t mean the end of European trade.
Brussels had warned throughout the referendum campaign that the assumption of Switzerland picking and choosing which EU freedoms it wished to enjoy is something that would be brought into question if the Swiss voted yes. That essentially was a thinly veiled threat of trade barriers. Now the ball in the Eurocrats court and we await their serving strategy.
