SCHWERZENBACH, Switzerland: The posters taped on the walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland's national electoral campaign: Three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag, as one of them kicks a single black sheep away.
"For Greater Security," the poster reads.
The poster is not the creation of a fringe movement, but of the most powerful party in Switzerland's federal Parliament and a member of the coalition government, an extreme-right party called the Swiss People's Party, or SVP. It has been distributed in a mass mailing to Swiss households, reproduced in newspapers and magazines and hung as huge billboards across the country.
As voters prepare to go to the polls for a general election in two weeks, the poster - and the party's underlying message - has polarized a country that prides itself on peaceful consensus in politics, neutrality in foreign policy and tolerance in human relations.
Suddenly, the campaign has turned into a nationwide debate over the place of immigrants in one of the world's oldest democracies and over what it means to be Swiss.
"The poster is disgusting, unacceptable," Micheline Calmy-Rey, president of Switzerland under a rotation system, said in an interview. "It stigmatizes others and plays on the fear factor and in that sense it's dangerous. The campaign does not correspond to Switzerland's multicultural openness to the world. And I am asking all Swiss who do not agree with its message to have the courage to speak out."
Interior Minister Pascal Couchepin, of the Free Democratic Party, has even suggested that the SVP's worship of Christoph Blocher, the billionaire who is the party's driving force and the current justice minister, is reminiscent of that of Italian Fascists for Mussolini.
On Saturday, a march of several thousand SVP supporters in Bern ended in clashes between hundreds of opposing demonstrators, who threw rocks, and riot police officers, who used tear gas to disperse them. The opponents of the SVP rally, organized by a group called the "Black Sheep Committee," were trying to prevent the SVP supporters from marching to Parliament.]
The message of the party resonates loudly among voters who have seen the country of 7.5 million people become a haven for foreigners, including political refugees from places like Kosovo and Rwanda. Polls indicate that the rightist party is poised to win the largest number of seats in Parliament in the election, as it did in national elections in 2003, when its populist language gave it nearly 27 percent of the vote.
"Our political enemies think the poster is racist, but it just gives a simple message," said Bruno Walliser, a chimney sweep who is running for Parliament on the party ticket at the Schwerzenbach rally, on a farm outside of Zurich. "The black sheep is not any black sheep that doesn't fit into the family. It's the foreign criminal who doesn't belong here, the one that doesn't obey Swiss law. We don't want him."
More than 20 percent of Swiss inhabitants are foreign nationals, and the SVP argues that a disproportionate number of them are law-breakers. The party says many of the country's drug dealers are foreign, and according to federal statistics about 70 percent of the prison population is non-Swiss.
As part of its platform, the SVP party has launched a campaign seeking the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to allow judges to deport foreigners who commit serious crimes after they have served their prison sentences. More ominously, the measure also calls for the deportation of the entire family of a convicted criminal under the age of 18.
Human rights advocates warn that the initiative is reminiscent of the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft, or kin liability, under which relatives of criminals were held responsible and punished for their crimes.
The party's political campaign has a much broader agenda than simply fighting crime. Its subliminal message is that the influx of foreigners has somehow polluted Swiss society, straining the social welfare system and threatening the very identity of the country.
Unlike France, where the far-right National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, campaigned for president last spring alongside black and ethnic Arab supporters, the SVP has taken a much cruder us-against-them approach.
The party's short, three-part film entitled "Heaven or Hell" in the current campaign clearly lays out its message. In the first segment, young men shoot heroin, steal handbags from old ladies, kick and beat up schoolboys, wield knives, and carry off a young woman. The second segment shows Muslims living in Switzerland - women in head scarves, men sitting not working.
The third segment shows "heavenly" Switzerland: men in suits rushing to work, logos of Swiss multinational corporations, farm harvests, experiments in laboratories, lakes, mountains, churches and goats. "The choice is clear: my home, our security," the film states.
It was withdrawn from the party's Web site after the male actors sued, arguing they were unaware of its purpose. But over beer and bratwurst at the Schwerzenbach political rally, Walliser screened it for the audience, saying, "I'm taking the liberty to show it anyway."
For Nelly Schneider, a 49-year-old secretary, the party's approach is "a little bit crass," but appealing nevertheless. "These foreigners abuse the system," she said after Walliser's presentation.
As most of the rest of Europe has moved to integrate, Switzerland has fiercely guarded its independence, staying out of the 27-country European Union and maintaining its status as a tax haven for the wealthy. It has perhaps the longest and most arduous process to become a citizen in all of Europe. Candidates typically must wait 12 years before being considered for citizenship.
Three years ago, the SVP blocked a move to liberalize the citizenship process, using the image of dark-skinned hands snatching at Swiss passports. And though the specter of terrorism has not been a driving issue in the country, some posters in southern Switzerland at the time showed a mock Swiss passport held by Osama bin Laden.
Foreigners, who make up one-fourth of the Swiss work force, complain that it is harder to get a job or rent an apartment without a Swiss passport, and that they endure harassment that Swiss citizens do not.
James Philippe, a 28-year-old Haitian who has lived in Switzerland for 14 years and works for Streetchurch, a Protestant storefront community organization, and as a hip-hop instructor, said he is regularly stopped by the police and required to show his papers and submit to body searches. He speaks German, French, Creole and English, but has yet to receive a Swiss passport.
"The police treat me like I'm somehow not human," he said.
