Switzerland

The aim of this chapter is to study the interactions between Switzerland’s mainstream parties and the Swiss People’s Party (SVP). Since 1999, the SVP has become the largest party in the country and it is currently the Western European populist radical right party with the largest vote share. An additional characteristic of the SVP is that it has never been a ‘niche’ party, nor an ‘outsider’. Indeed, the party has been constantly represented in the federal government during the last decades, while continuing to exploit the tools provided by direct democracy for its own purposes. In this chapter, we cover a wide time span (1992–2018) and focus on the SVP’s core issues: immigration, law and order, and European integration. Our results show that the traditional mainstream parties adopted a variety of different strategies vis-à-vis the SVP, thereby mixing cooperation, co-optation, clashing, and dismissive strategies. Whilst cooptation developed into the dominant approach as far as immigration and law and order were concerned, clashing strategies became increasingly important when it came to European integration. However, as a rule mainstream parties could not avoid collaborative strategies entirely, given that the SVP was their partner in government