Could Switzerland Become the First Country to Cap Its Population?
Once upon a time, in the town of Maienfeld, high up in the Swiss Alps, there lived an orphan with a heart of gold. A cruel aunt sent her off to seek her fortune in crowded, sooty Frankfurt, but city life nearly killed her, so she was swiftly returned to the fresh mountain air.
Since then, the world has come to Heidi. From the train station in Maienfeld, near the border with Liechtenstein, a footpath leads up to Heididorf, a reproduction of the idyllic farm where Johanna Spyri’s beloved children’s novel—named for its protagonist and published in 1880—is set. On a cold Saturday in late March, two women from Hong Kong hiked up to pay homage to the nineteen-seventies Japanese anime adaptation, which in East Asia has made “Heidi” nearly as famous as “Harry Potter.” A family of five from Kerala, India, asked me to take their photograph as they posed against the jagged peaks. The hills resounded with Spanish as another family descended to a “Heidi”-themed restaurant, whose parking lot accommodates double-decker tour buses.
At the base of the mountain, elected representatives from across Switzerland were arriving for a convention whose agenda stood at odds with this international scene. Colorful lawn signs, erected outside a sports center, read “Keine 10-Millionen Schweiz!” (“No to a Switzerland with 10 Million!”)
On June 14th, Switzerland will vote on whether to become the only country in the world to officially cap its population, with a limit of ten million people until 2050. (The current population is 9.1 million.) The initiative, which was put forward by the Swiss People’s Party (S.V.P.) and in recent polls has been supported by as many as fifty-two per cent of respondents, would require the government to curb growth through two main measures. The first, triggered as soon as Switzerland exceeds 9.5 million inhabitants, would lead to restrictions in the areas of asylum and family reunification. If the population surpasses ten million for two consecutive years, the second measure would kick in, requiring the termination of the Free Movement of Persons agreement, which allows citizens of the European Union to work, study, and live in Switzerland (and vice versa). This move would rupture Switzerland’s relations with the E.U., its closest partner in trade and security. “The whole package of bilateral agreements would be at stake,” Michael Siegenthaler, a labor economist at the public university E.T.H. Zurich, said. “It’s quite likely that the European Union would cancel all of them.” A population ceiling is more or less unprecedented; the closest comparison might be conservation laws that limit human settlement in ecologically fragile places like the Galápagos Islands.
Switzerland is a direct democracy, in which every federal law is subject to popular vote. Like all of the country’s political parties, the S.V.P. convenes several times a year to define its positions on upcoming initiatives—including those which it has proposed itself, like the population measure. In the Maienfeld sports hall, rows of tables extended the length of a basketball court, and waiters weaved among them, balancing trays of coffee and nut torte. The seating arrangement was by canton (the equivalent, in Switzerland’s intensely federal system, of an American state), and centerpieces bore the coat of arms of each. Next to Geneva’s emblem of an eagle and a St. Peter key, three delegates shared a midmorning bottle of red wine.
Jars of honey that were being sold for a Party fund-raiser came with a warning label: “The EU wants in on our honey pots!” A hundred and twenty thousand Europeans moved to Switzerland last year, drawn by its high wages and quality of life, and four hundred thousand more commute from France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Liechtenstein. It is this abundant migration which the S.V.P., a right-wing party, hopes to stop.
A brass band accompanied the singing of the national anthem, and then the Party’s vice-president, Thomas Matter, widely regarded as the pioneer of the population cap, took the stage. “Our citizens,” he announced, “have finally had enough.”
In a country as prosperous as Switzerland, one could be forgiven for asking, Enough of what?
The alpine traditionalism on display at Heididorf notwithstanding, Switzerland is among the most cosmopolitan nations in Europe. More than thirty per cent of its permanent residents were born abroad. The working-age population is increasing, owing to consistent employment growth and a steady flow of migrants who are often highly skilled and actively recruited, and tend to come from bordering countries that have significant cultural and linguistic overlaps with Switzerland. In 2002, these people gained the right to work and study in the country without a visa, and since then the nation’s population has swelled by nearly two million. Globally, Switzerland now has the sixth-highest G.D.P. per capita, according to the World Bank. (The United States ranks twelfth.) “Most countries in Europe are concerned about the other issue—depopulation,” Emilio Zagheni, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, told me.
The initiative, whose other official name is the Nachhaltigkeitsinitiative (Sustainability Initiative), is couched in the language of environmentalism. The S.V.P. proposes it as a solution to the consequences of unchecked growth: housing shortages and rising rents in cities, overcrowded trains, clogged roads and highways, and the loss of green space to new construction. In towns such as Maienfeld, the influx of mass tourism gives the impression that even remote valleys have become overrun. “Every major problem in our country,” Matter said from the stage, “is directly or indirectly linked to the incredible explosion of the population.”
Matter, who is sixty, comes from the medieval town of Sissach, twenty minutes by train from Basel. A career banker, he told me that he’d worked at Merrill Lynch in New York and London before returning to Switzerland, in 1994, where he co-founded a private bank. After he was implicated in an investigation into insider trading, he resigned. (Both Matter and the bank denied any wrongdoing, and the investigation into Matter was eventually dropped.) He later co-founded another bank.
Today, Matter is reportedly among the three hundred wealthiest individuals in Switzerland. On his YouTube series, “In the Swamps of Bern,” he sends out dispatches from the Swiss capital, where he serves in Parliament. In a recent episode (titled “Fake News About Mass Immigration”), he stood at a gleaming white enamel desk, like a news anchor, with printed notes before a green screen, and claimed that countries such as Ukraine, Bosnia, Georgia, and Albania were preparing to join the E.U., which would allow their citizens to move to Switzerland. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, he wears loose dark suits, with no tie, and carries himself with the confidence of someone used to reassuring clients with large fortunes.
Matter got into politics in the early twenty-tens, almost on a dare. During the lunch break at Maienfeld, as the waiters swapped nut torte for cheesy spätzle, he told me, “A lot of entrepreneurs, friends of mine, they always said, ‘Those politicians, they’re doing only stupid things.’ ” One day, he suggested sending one of their cohort to Bern. “And they said, ‘O.K., O.K., but not me. I have no time.’ And finally I said, ‘O.K., I will run for Parliament.’ And then I got elected.” Earlier this year, Matter helped lead another controversial initiative, to defund public media, which was defeated. His goal with the population cap, he said, is “quite simple”: “I know if we continue like this for the next twenty-five years, compared with the last twenty-five years, our country is kaputt.” He added, “My motivation in politics is really that my children can have the same country that I had.”
The S.V.P. represents a segment of the population which is straining against the very economic and international legal order that has underwritten the country’s extraordinary success. In Maienfeld, the Party’s president, Marcel Dettling, announced, “We don’t want to become a second Singapore!” Supporters of the initiative, rather than presenting Switzerland as a nation in terminal decline, describe a homeland that has been rendered unrecognizable—like a landscape after a heavy snowfall—by rapid growth. The quality of life was already world-class, so the benefits of the recent economic windfall can feel obscure. “There are no apartments anymore,” a woman named Sabrina told me, at another S.V.P. event. “And if there are they’re hardly affordable.” She was born in 1986, when the population was 6.5 million. Since then, life has simply become more challenging. “Things aren’t so carefree anymore,” she said. “Let’s put it this way.”
Sabrina spoke in vague terms about the “conflict” that comes with an increasingly multinational society. But Matter scoffed at the idea that the initiative has nativist undertones. “We were always diverse. That’s our strength, actually,” he said, citing the nation’s multilingualism. “In Switzerland, we were never xenophobic. And now I start feeling that people are getting fremdenfeindlich”—hostile to strangers. “And we don’t want that, you know? Because we never, ever had anything against foreigners. But it has to be at a speed that we can handle.”
For more than a century, Switzerland has hosted large numbers of foreign-born workers. When the Gotthard Tunnel, a fifteen-kilometre passage linking Lucerne and the Italian-speaking outpost of Ticino, opened, in 1882, it was the longest railway tunnel in the world, and it had been constructed largely by laborers from Italy.
Wage competition with native workers led to riots in Zurich and Bern. But, by 1910, foreigners made up nearly fifteen per cent of the population, a proportion exceeding that of any other European country save Luxembourg. It was around this time that the concept of Überfremdung (“over-foreignization”) began to spread through national politics. “One could say Switzerland is a precursor of European populism,” Francesca Falk, a lecturer in migration history at the University of Bern, told me, in part because it was the first European country to establish modern direct-democratic mechanisms capable of translating national sentiments into popular votes.
It takes a hundred thousand signatures to launch an initiative to change the constitution, as the “No to a Switzerland with 10 Million!” campaign aims to do. Initiatives that target the rights of foreigners, Falk said, have typically been most successful during periods of economic expansion. Switzerland was officially neutral in the Second World War, emerging with a robust infrastructure that allowed it to become a main exporter to a rebuilding continent. The subsequent boom fuelled the expansion of Swiss multinational corporations—Nestlé, Roche, what is now Novartis—that are the backbone of its economy. The growth attracted a fresh wave of foreign workers. By the early seventies, foreigners made up sixteen per cent of the population; a few years later, Switzerland had become the richest country in Europe, besides Monaco and Liechtenstein. Despite the prosperity, many Swiss had mixed emotions about the guest workers, who came largely from Southern Europe. As the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observed, “We wanted workers, but we got people.”
The swell of labor from Italy attracted the attention of a reformed Nazi sympathizer and Catholic convert named James Schwarzenbach. He drew up a proposal, called Against Over-Foreignization (Überfremdung), now known as the Schwarzenbach Initiative, that would have limited foreign residents to ten per cent of the population, with an exception for Geneva. Though it was rejected, in 1970, the unease that it articulated has lingered. In recent decades, migration-related initiatives have appeared every few years. In 2014, an S.V.P. measure, Against Mass Immigration, was narrowly adopted, but Parliament managed to implement it without rupturing important arrangements with the E.U. Another S.V.P. initiative, which in 2016 was rejected by an eighteen-point margin, would have stripped foreigners with criminal records of their residency rights, even if they had committed only minor infractions; the measure would have applied even to people born and raised in Switzerland. An infamous poster promoting that campaign depicted white sheep kicking their black brethren out of the frame.
The S.V.P. has maintained some distance from other right-wing parties in Europe, such as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland and France’s National Rally. It does not trade in Holocaust denial, and it retains a reputation for coöperating with other parties and institutions at the cantonal level. Nevertheless, in national politics, the Party acts as a clearing house for Switzerland’s most extreme expressions of nativism. “There is no party to the right of the S.V.P.,” Jakob Tanner, a professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Zurich, told me; the S.V.P. “soaked up” more extreme movements in the nineties. And its use of initiatives to restrict immigration has served as an inspiration to right-wing movements in Europe. “They always say, ‘We have to do something like Switzerland,’ ” Tanner said.
Support for initiatives tends to decline as the vote approaches. The population cap, however, has threatened to defy that trend. Toward the end of April, a former high-ranking federal official told me he believed that there was even more support for the proposal than the latest polls showed. At a dinner party he attended recently, a majority of guests—none of them S.V.P. supporters—were in favor, viewing a yes vote as a signal that they “don’t feel at home, at home.”
A fifth of Switzerland’s population is Francophone. The overwhelming majority live in a narrow corridor of wine country, stretching from Geneva to Montreux, that is almost entirely engulfed by France. The border is rarely more than an hour’s drive or ferry ride away. As a result, French-speaking Switzerland hosts more cross-border workers—frontaliers—than anywhere else in the country. This transient population resides in France but works and often pays income tax in Switzerland. If the initiative passes, the employment status of the frontaliers will suddenly be in limbo, as will the future of the businesses that employ them.
One spring day, David Raedler, a thirty-nine-year-old employment lawyer and a mobility activist, took me by bike down the Route Blanche, a two-lane road that leads through rolling Swiss vineyards before climbing into the Jura Mountains. The road, which connects the canton of Vaud—the home of Nestlé—to France, is an overtaxed throughway for cross-border commuters. We passed apartment blocks, a local supermarket chain, and a McDonald’s, and then were suddenly banked by farmland. Outside a stone farmhouse, a tractor was partly obscured by an orchard that had erupted in white blossoms. “Those are apple trees,” Raedler said. “At least, I’m pretty sure.”
Raedler represents the Green Party on the Vaud cantonal council. In 2024, he was a leading figure in a successful referendum to oppose the expansion of national highways, a project developed in response to complaints about traffic jams exacerbated, in places like Vaud, by frontaliers. Were it not for this effort, part of the farmland we were biking through would be gone, claimed by extra lanes and a spaghetti bowl of highway exits.
“We used the slogan ‘Trop c’est trop,’ ” in French-speaking Switzerland, he said, or “Enough is enough,” and, in German-speaking Switzerland, “Zu gross für die Schweiz,” or “Too big for Switzerland.” Although a survey indicated that many voters were convinced by the campaign’s emphasis on environmental impact and the need for improved public transit, Raedler believes that the victory reflected a broader sense that there are simply “too many people.”
Like most politicians in Switzerland, Raedler has a day job, and he had arrived for our bike tour directly from his law office, dressed in a light-blue oxford shirt and khakis. He studied at the universities of Lausanne and Bern, where he perfected his German, and was a visiting researcher at Harvard before returning to Switzerland, in 2017. Like Heidi, he was homesick: “I missed the landscape. I missed cheese—I missed Gruyère.”
Our destination was a third-generation family vineyard, owned by Maurice Gay. A member of the center-right party Les Libéraux-Radicaux (P.L.R.), Gay serves on the Vaud council, across the aisle from Raedler. He took over the vineyard from his father, and his thirty-year-old son is preparing to inherit it. He greeted us outside wooden gates opening onto the farmhouse and vines, where he grows Chasselas—a Swiss white grape—and a variety of reds. The hum of the highway reached us across an arable field. The proposed expansion would have overtaken this land, sending cloverleaf ramps within twenty metres of Gay’s farm. “I don’t have anything against frontaliers,” he said. “But there are many French who come in individual vehicles,” with a single driver per car.
“That’s the whole point of this issue regarding mobility—how to manage with more people,” Raedler said. Gay opposes the population initiative on the ground of excessive state intervention. The S.V.P. aims to “protect our country through border controls and population limits,” he said. “But Switzerland is small compared with Europe. At some point, we have to try to find a solution to live—not just to survive but to live in the midst of this Europe.”
A multilingual, politically idiosyncratic country bordering five other nations, Switzerland can feel at once culturally hermetic and geographically porous. “The percentage of foreigners in Switzerland is very high,” Raedler acknowledged. But, he argued, “there’s also huge assimilation with Swiss values like politeness, or our calm politics.” Raedler, whose mother is British, is a dual citizen, making him among the one in five Swiss who hold two passports. “That’s what in a way makes me sad about this initiative,” he said. “It attacks something that works well.”
Gay’s farm is twenty-five kilometres northeast of Geneva, which hosts many United Nations agencies, the World Trade Organization, the country’s most infamous free port, and one of the world’s largest banking and commodity-trading sectors. It also has the highest number of foreign-born residents in the country, and one of the most overheated housing markets. Vincent Schaller, a tax specialist and a city councillor representing the Union Démocratique du Centre—the French name of the S.V.P.—is among the roughly two-fifths of the canton’s residents who are Genevan. Schaller used to be a representative for the P.L.R., but he defected in 2017. “The primary reason to be in the S.V.P. is the European question,” he said. The Swiss direct-democracy system is “not soluble with the E.U.”
One rainy Saturday morning, Schaller and other S.V.P. representatives handed out flyers and hot coffee to passersby at a farmers’ market in Rive, an upscale shopping district at the base of Geneva’s Old Town, which was once home to the likes of Calvin and Rousseau. Schaller pointed to a placard that volunteers had hung beneath the coffee station, which showed cartoon yellow cranes—evocative of a construction boom—suspended over a church steeple and a splash of Kelly green. “That could be Geneva,” he said. “That could be anywhere.” He added that the initiative’s threat to Free Movement of Persons, which is popular with Switzerland’s many dual citizens, would arrive at a comfortable delay. It’s not directly “against foreigners,” he said. A shopper with a shock of white hair, carrying two wicker baskets overflowing with fresh greens, called out, “Du fond du cœur!” (“From the bottom of my heart!”) to signal his support. Another man, motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm, told me that the population cap was “ridiculous”—it reminded him of the marketing strategy of pricing goods at 9.99 francs instead of ten. “It’s easy to oversimplify a complex issue,” he said.
Given that employed Europeans make up the majority of migrants to Switzerland, it’s hard not to notice that the first demographic to be targeted by the initiative would be refugees and asylum seekers. Tucked into a hillside in the sleepy Francophone village of Matran, a former seminary now serves as La Maison de Formation et d’Intégration, a transitional center for people under legal protection. Céline Stritt, who manages the center’s administration and finances, told me that when the Catholic charity Caritas, which operates La Maison, purchased the site, in 2018, locals “made a petition” to oppose it. We stood in the arts-and-crafts room, on the second floor, overlooking a former dairy, whose date of dedication—1935—was stencilled below the eaves in burnt-orange paint. At the bottom of the hill, a crane hovered over an unfinished apartment complex rising among traditional single-family homes. Stritt said that relations with villagers have improved. Some craft workshops at the center are open to local children as well as to refugees, and, this winter, everyone got together to make drip-wax candles by hand.
In 2025, Switzerland granted asylum to more than seven thousand people. Applicants who gain admission are distributed to cantons throughout the country, where they are expected to complete workforce- and language-integration programs. Caritas operates such programs at La Maison for refugees assigned to Fribourg, which has a Francophone majority. Residents spend six months learning to navigate the medical and social systems, developing professional skills, and studying French.
In April, when I visited, nearly half of the ninety spots at La Maison were vacant, owing in part to the recent departure of a cohort of Ukrainians who had completed the program. “It comes in waves,” Stritt explained. “In December, we were almost full.” The remaining occupants were mainly Afghan, Eritrean, and Sudanese.
Michel François used to work with Switzerland’s homeless population. He is now a case manager at La Maison, tracking residents during their time at the center and briefly after their departure. He answered my questions with a patience honed by years advocating for social causes. When I asked how most of La Maison’s refugees arrived in Switzerland, he gave a slight shrug, and said, “They walked.” He paused, then added, “Maybe some people from Turkey, they take a plane.”
About half of Switzerland’s refugees—and others in the asylum system—find work within seven years of arriving, fulfilling a national integration target. (The employment rate for the general population is about eighty per cent.) At La Maison, two Eritrean women staff the on-site crèche, or day care. Zeyneb, who came to Switzerland in 2012, told me, in French, that she had been working there for eight years. Across from the chapel—a vestige of the building’s former life—volunteers run a secondhand-clothing shop, where residents can purchase donated items at nominal prices. “It helps them keep a relationship to money,” Stritt explained. We admired a maroon Jacquard jacket fit snugly over a half-bust mannequin. Then she pointed to a pair of gray sneakers in a row of women’s heels. “Those are my son’s,” she said.
My tour began in a small conference room, set with sparkling water and biscuits, where I was led through a thorough PowerPoint presentation about the Swiss asylum system. A nervous charge hung in the air. Though for many voters the initiative’s measures are veiled in the hypothetical, pegged to demographic projections, refugees, such as the residents of La Maison, and others within the asylum system will feel its effects in the near term.
Switzerland currently hosts more than two hundred thousand people under some form of legal protection. A third of them are Ukrainians who have entered the country since 2022. Another forty thousand have been allowed into the country on “provisional admission,” a status that applies overwhelmingly to people who don’t meet the narrow criteria of the Geneva Convention on refugees, from 1951, which do not necessarily include people fleeing armed conflict, such as refugees from civil war. Provisional admission can be converted into a regular residency permit after five years, provided that applicants meet language and other integration requirements.
After the country surpasses 9.5 million people, a scenario expected as soon as 2029, the initiative would strip those granted provisional admission of any possibility of gaining residency rights. “They would only be left with the bare minimum,” Anja Klug, the head of the office for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for Switzerland and Liechtenstein, told me. Under the principle of non-refoulement, it would be illegal for Switzerland to deport these individuals to their countries of origin if they risk “irreparable” harm. The result would be a shadow population, Klug said, that would be impossible to integrate either legally or socially. The initiative’s call to restrict family reunification is written in such a way that it could affect everyone in the asylum system.
Both Stritt and François told me that La Maison focussed on its daily work rather than on policy discussions. As a voter, however, Stritt was unconvinced by the initiative. “Where does the ten million come from?” she said. “Why not seven million? Why didn’t we say it at six million?” Switzerland had a population of seven million in 1995. “Are we sadder, poorer, than we were? It’s not because there are more people that things are more difficult.”
The canton of St. Gallen is named for a celebrated immigrant, the Irish monk Gallus, who settled on the site of its famous abbey—now a UNESCO World Heritage site—in 612.
Flanked by Austria and Liechtenstein, and separated from Germany by a glacial lake, St. Gallen is another border canton that plays host to frontaliers, here known as Grenzgänger. On a Wednesday evening in April, three hundred people crammed into the lime-green auditorium of a high school to hear representatives from across the political spectrum debate the population cap. It was one of dozens of public events scheduled before the vote.
The evening’s headliner was Beat Jans, who serves on the Bundesrat, or Federal Council, a seven-member body that is the country’s highest level of government. Parliament elects members to the Bundesrat, and the role of President rotates annually among the councillors.
Part of the Bundesrat’s mandate is to offer recommendations on whether to adopt popular initiatives that, if passed, will be incorporated into Switzerland’s ever-evolving constitution. (Walter Thurnherr, who was the Federal Chancellor, or chief of staff of the Bundesrat, until 2023, told me that he used to explain the system to his European counterparts by saying, “You have a fixed constitution and regularly change your government. We regularly change the constitution but keep our government.”) The Bundesrat’s position on the population cap is an unambiguous no. “This initiative would endanger Switzerland’s prosperity, hamper the functioning of society, and jeopardize the bilateral path with the EU,” the council—which includes two members of the S.V.P.—warned in an official message to Parliament. It has fallen to Jans, who is the head of the Department of Justice and Police, and therefore oversees immigration, to convince the voting public.
Jans, who is sixty-one, grew up outside Basel, the son of a metalworker. He trained in agricultural engineering and in the eighties worked in sustainable development in Haiti and Paraguay with the Swiss non-governmental organization Helvetas. Witnessing the effects of the dictatorships in those countries motivated him to enter politics, as a member of the Social Democratic Party, in 1998. “I realized how absolutely crucial it is to have a constitutional democracy based on the rule of law,” he told me. He was elected to the Bundesrat in 2023. Above his desk in Bern hangs a mosaic of small canvas paintings, each a Fauvist variation on an abstracted fleur-de-lis, symbolizing diversity within togetherness. “That’s my motto,” he said. “We work better together.”
The initiative’s use of the word “sustainability” has put its opponents, especially left-of-center parties, in a tricky position. In a country as rich as Switzerland, the standard sales pitch for immigration—that it boosts the economy—appears less and less persuasive. By attacking relations with the rest of Europe, the S.V.P. has also forced the opposition to defend an international order with which many voters are already disillusioned—a drawback that similarly hampered the Remain campaign, in advance of the Brexit vote, in 2016.
“It’s so easy to think this one measure—keeping foreigners out—will solve all the problems,” Jans said. “But this is not going to happen. I think the opposite might be true.” He noted that post-Brexit Britain saw an increased number of asylum seekers, because applicants whose dossiers were rejected in the E.U. suddenly became eligible to reapply in the United Kingdom, an opportunity likely to be available in Switzerland.
Jans’s core message, however, was that the population cap would increase uncertainty in already unstable times. When the initiative was submitted, in 2024, he reminded the audience in St. Gallen, the world was a different place. “At the time, international trade was still following clear rules,” he said. “The U.S. and Europe stood united against the Russian aggressor. NATO was an intact military alliance. That world, ladies and gentlemen, is history.” These changes, he argued, leave Switzerland more in need of reliable partners than ever before.
The government’s highest estimates for population growth put Switzerland on track to reach ten million people by 2033. The cap would then impose an effective net-zero immigration flow—one person out (or deceased), one person in. “Imagine a society in which a Swiss citizen is permitted to live with their foreign partner in Switzerland only when another person leaves the country,” Economiesuisse, an influential business federation, has said, calling the cap the “Chaos Initiative.” Dominik Hangartner, a political scientist and a director at the Immigration Policy Lab, a joint venture between E.T.H. Zurich and Stanford University, told me that the initiative, by locking the country into a fixed path, would render Switzerland “a little like Ulysses, when he was bound to the mast to not follow siren calls.” This might be wise for a seafarer set on a specific destination, but it is a poor way to run a country, Hangartner said, “given how fast the world is changing.”
John Springford, a fellow at the Centre for European Reform, has estimated that by mid-2022 Brexit had shaved five per cent off the U.K.’s G.D.P. and reduced over-all trade by ten to fifteen per cent. The hit to trade would be especially painful for Switzerland, which has an export-dependent economy. Its financial-services sector is also globally entangled: forty per cent of the world’s coal and sixty per cent of its gold are exchanged by traders in hubs like Geneva,Ticino, and Zug. And reducing immigration would exacerbate existing labor shortages. Though the initiative would technically allow firms and small businesses to hire foreigners on short-term work permits—a return to the guest-worker model of the twentieth century—lack of residency status for these workers would make it difficult to recruit from abroad. “You’re competing with other European countries to bring in labor,” Springford said. “That’s quite difficult. Migrants respond to those kind of incentives.” Nearly three-quarters of new doctors in Switzerland were trained outside the country.
Onstage in St. Gallen, S.V.P. representatives dismissed these concerns, referring to a snowball effect: more people means more demand for housing and services. “Growth continues unabated,” Lukas Reimann, an S.V.P. representative for St. Gallen, said. “If you don’t find ten million too many, is fifteen million too many? Twenty million?”
“Growth is not a dogma, or an end unto itself,” Stefan Schmid, the editor-in-chief of the St. Galler Tagblatt and the moderator of the debate, said. Acknowledging those voters who, he said, had a sense of Unbehagen, or unease, about the recent growth, he asked Jans, “What do you say to them? Do you understand their concerns?”
The word Unbehagen came up frequently in my interviews. In German, it carries deeper resonances of repression. One might say that Heidi is struck with a bad case of Unbehagen in Frankfurt: too ashamed to tell her host family that she wants to return to Maienfeld, she simply lies in bed, wasting away. “You have everything you can possibly want here,” the housekeeper scolds her. “It’s because you are too well off and comfortable that you have nothing to do but think what naughty thing you can do next!”
To the late Swiss literary scholar Karl Schmid, Heidi’s malaise might have embodied the “conditions of the small state,” as he wrote, in a globalized world. In 1963, Schmid, who was a professor of literature at the University of Zurich, published an influential study of modern Swiss authors, “Unbehagen im Kleinstaat,” or “Unease in the Small State.” (The name is a play on the German title of Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents,” “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.”) For generations of Swiss writers that came of age in an increasingly global order, Schmid argued, to hail from a “small state” such as Switzerland was to be haunted by a kind of “fatelessness.” The sense of a loss of control, the feeling that one has no veto or decision-making power on the world stage, was exacerbated by Switzerland’s neutrality in the Cold War, and by its aloofness to the broader project of European integration. The small state, Schmid wrote, feels relegated to “a space in between the great nations and cultures.”
“We’re not big, but we’re also not tiny,” David Raedler said. “We’re not Luxembourg, but people have that feeling of being a small country. You’re defending it.” ♦