Now comes the sustainability initiative

As so often, the SVP came first. In the fall, she opened the 2023 election campaign against the “left-wing destroyers”. The People’s Party focused on the energy crisis – but also on immigration, against which it announced a new referendum: the Sustainability Initiative.

Hardly anyone is talking about the energy crisis anymore, but everyone is talking about the ten million Swiss. It is all the more astonishing that the SVP has so far talked a lot about the asylum system, but hardly about population growth.

It is quite possible that this has something to do with the shortage of skilled labour, which has been in the public eye in recent months. The Swiss economy has clearly positioned itself: the gap cannot be closed without immigration. However, no civil party wants to get involved in entrepreneurship.

SVP relies on the proven

The SVP’s planned sustainability initiative was almost forgotten. With the request, the People’s Party wants to build on successes such as the mass immigration initiative of 2014. Their goal: Switzerland must not grow beyond ten million inhabitants.

Only: when will the initiative come? And what exactly does it say?

SonntagsBlick knows: SVP party chairman Thomas Aeschi (44) has now completed the text with party members Thomas Matter (56), Manuel Strupler (42) and Mike Egger (30).

The central demands: the Bundesrat must take measures in the asylum system for more than 9.5 million inhabitants; and international treaties affecting population growth must be reviewed by the state government – ​​which would mean renegotiating the free movement of people with the EU, for example.

Termination of the agreement on the free movement of persons

If Switzerland exceeds the ten million threshold, the Federal Council must bring the number of inhabitants back below this limit within two years. Failing that, it will have to terminate the agreement on the free movement of persons with the EU. The same would apply to the UN Migration Pact, should Switzerland join it by then.

The text is apparently already in the Federal Chancellery for preliminary examination. In the summer, the SVP wants to ignite the initiative, probably at the delegates’ meeting in early July – well in time for the start of the hot campaign phase.

And why is the term sustainability in the title of an anti-immigration initiative? “More people automatically means higher resource consumption,” says National Councilor Egger. “The fact is that we were able to reduce our per capita electricity consumption by 10.3 percent between 2001 and 2019, but in absolute terms this has increased by 6.4 percent.”

The situation is similar to greenhouse gas emissions: “We were able to reduce these by more than 33 percent per capita between 1990 and 2019, but only by 15 percent in absolute terms.” Food supply is another issue, says Egger: “More and more people are coming to fewer and fewer farms – from which more and more productivity is demanded, while at the same time ecologization is increasing. This is special class contradiction policy. »

For Egger it is clear: “We don’t want to become the new Singapore. That’s why we need to act now.”

Source:Blick