Joseph de
Weck
Capping
the population at 10 million is a far-right fantasy. It would dismantle the
openness that has made the country rich
Tue 9 Jun
2026 05.00 BST
Zürich on
a Sunday morning can feel like the day after Armageddon: so empty, so calm,
despite being Switzerland’s biggest city. But then the church bells erupt
across the lake basin, and a jogger trots by like a polite deer in aerodynamic
sunglasses, and one knows that all is fine in this proudly impeccable place,
where little is left to chance and the authorities even track the city’s
pigeons with GPS.
Swiss
people know they are lucky. A highly diversified economy keeps salaries high
and income inequality comparatively low. A British friend once remarked that
our supermarkets feel like the gourmet hall at Harrods. The state makes
business easy. Hiking paths are maintained by armies of volunteers. The flip
side is our reputation for being a nation of humourless control freaks, but
there are benefits to trains running on time. In a restless world, Switzerland
remains a place where one can exhale.
The
problem with luck, of course, is that one becomes afraid of losing it. But
fortune has a tendency to make conservatives of us all, of course. Yet how to
preserve what one cherishes?
The
answer offered by the far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) is to freeze the
country. On 14 June, Swiss voters will decide whether the permanent population
should be capped at 10 million. That threshold could be reached sometime
between 2033 and 2041. Polls suggest the vote will be on a knife edge.
Switzerland’s
population has indeed grown rapidly. In the last 25 years, it jumped from 7.2
to 9.1 million, with roughly four-fifths of that increase driven by
immigration. The SVP, the country’s largest political party, blames this for
rising rents, crowded trains and “density stress”: a reminder to democrats
across Europe that a healthy economy won’t stop the far right. There will
always be voters receptive to immigrant-blamingfor whatever ails the moment.
For their leaders, the boat is always “full” – the metaphor famously used by
the SVP’s predecessor party, when its justice minister Eduard von Steiger in
1942 compared Switzerland to a “small, crowded lifeboat with limited capacity”
to justify turning away Jewish refugees.
By most
measures, Switzerland is not especially crowded. Population density in Zürich
is lower than in spread-out Berlin and less than a quarter of that of packed
Paris. Living space per inhabitant is above the European average. Rents have
risen, certainly, but so have wages. In 2006, the average household saved
roughly 10% of its income after taxes, housing and consumption. By 2023, that
figure had climbed to about 18%.
There are
real growing pains. Low-income earners devote a slightly larger share of their
earnings to rent than 20 years ago. But that is simply an argument for building
more, especially Swiss-style public and cooperative housing, not for shutting
the borders.
The SVP’s
framing of immigration as the culprit for strained infrastructure is also a bit
rich, given the detrimental policies it supports: weakening tenant protections,
deprioritising rail investment and championing the low-tax policies that
attract corporates and wealthy foreigners in the first place.
Coherence
may not be a valuable currency in politics. But if the initiative is so
dangerous and the debate about it so fractious – it is opposed by every other
party in parliament – it is also because it is about much more than migration:
it is a Swiss Brexit by stealth.
Should
this referendum pass, and should the population then exceed 10 million, Berne
would be required to terminate its agreement with the EU on the free movement
of people. The agreements linking Switzerland to the EU’s single market would
become null and void, opening the way to the SVP’s long-held dream: reimagining
Switzerland as a deregulated, buccaneering hub trading freely with the world. A
sort of Alpine Dubai.
It is a
fundamentally unserious fantasy. The heyday of free trade is over. Swiss
exports going to Asia have dropped by 6.5% since 2022. Tariffs have caused
sales to the US to fall by 25% this year. Like it or not, 51% of what
Switzerland sells goes to Europe, which remains by far the most important
growth market for its exporters.
If there
is one near-uncontested lesson from modern economic history, it is that open
societies win. Openness to immigration was long the defining superpower of the
US. Japan’s strict immigration policy explains its dismal growth performance,
and the fact that its average effective retirement age for men stands at 69.5
years.
Switzerland’s
remarkable ascent from peasant backwater to high-tech economy in 200 years
tells the same tale. With no natural resources, Switzerland has grown wealthy
because it has provided a stable economic climate that attracted foreign
innovators. Nestlé, Swatch, and pharma giant Novartis – these iconically
“Swiss” firms were all founded or built by immigrants.
Moreover,
beneath the economics lies something even more troubling. What makes the Dubai
model so appealing to the radical right is that abandoning EU treaties would
not only allow the SVP to cut immigration but also to strip foreigners of their
rights entirely. For instance, theyhave proposed barring German and French
workers from bringing their families. Switzerland would join the league of
autocratic states that deny foreigners what conservatives claim to hold most
dear: a life rooted in family.
The true
miracle of Switzerland’s long economic success is that it avoided the
“Buddenbrooks trap”. In Thomas Mann’s novel, successive generations of a
prosperous German family grow more comfortable, self-focused and emotionally
fragile, losing the pragmatism that created their fortune. Switzerland, by
contrast, has maintained discipline and adaptability.
Perhaps
that tradition is now fading. If the vote is as tight as forecasts suggest, it
is because even many center-right voters have come to believe they can afford
themselves the decadent dream of stasis.
What is
certain, however, is that freezing the country would not preserve it. It would
do exactly the opposite, dismantling the very openness that made it prosperous.
History
is not especially kind to societies that confuse preservation with paralysis.
Joseph de
Weck is an associate fellow with the German Council on Foreign Relations and
writes for Guardian Europe from Zürich and Paris
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