00:00Let's bring in Dr. Georgia Samaras, who's Assistant Professor of Public Policy at King's College here in London.
00:06Good to have you with us, Dr. Samaras. Thank you for joining us.
00:08So, Swiss voters rejected the population cap vote, but the result was still quite close, wasn't it?
00:13What does that tell us, do you think, about how divided the Swiss electorate is on this issue?
00:20I think that there is this impression that Switzerland has a direct democracy system
00:26that allows people through referenda to make meaningful decisions about policymaking in the country.
00:32In my view, it's such a flawed idea.
00:34The division that you accurately pointed out is serious.
00:38There is nearly 45% of the population that believes that through biopolitical measures
00:44they will be able to control the population.
00:46This is all against migration, and the referendum was proposed by the far right,
00:51which also indicates that some of these ideas have entered the mainstream in the most aggressive way possible,
00:57and it shows also that countries will inevitably rely on those measures to curb the migration waves in Europe.
01:05So, yeah, we're witnessing some really, really groundbreaking measures within European states.
01:11And just let's talk a little bit about this idea of direct democracy
01:14and this interesting system that there is in Switzerland where major national issues can be put to the whole nation
01:22to vote on in referenda, something that's not that common.
01:26Of course, we had something similar 10 years ago in Britain, which led to very serious consequences.
01:30But leaving that aside, for Switzerland, does this system of so-called direct democracy,
01:35does it lead to effective government, or can it lead to chaos?
01:38And how binding are these votes?
01:40If it had passed, for example, would Switzerland really have been forced to leave the EU's free movement of people
01:46system, for example?
01:49They're not legally binding, and the state doesn't have to implement them,
01:54but their ideas and also some of those concepts that are being proposed are absolutely absurd.
01:59In the middle of the pandemic, they managed to ban face covers like kneecap from public.
02:05This was aimed at targeted tiny percentage of the population in Switzerland that happens to identify as Muslim.
02:15With this latest referendum, despite not being legally binding, it demonstrates how powerful the far-right has become.
02:23I mentioned earlier Michel Foucault, which is the biopolitical nature,
02:27the state tries to legislate over bodies and identities to curb migration financially.
02:34That would be a disastrous decision, primarily because what you also pointed out about the measures that will be required
02:42to be introduced
02:44before the 10 million, basically if it passed the 10 million mark,
02:50because they will have to leave free movement.
02:54What would that look like?
02:56What is Switzerland prepared to do to deal with the economic destruction that will follow
03:03without any kind of migration coming to the country?
03:07That's what I mean about direct democracy.
03:09It's flawed because it tries to give some power to the people,
03:13but the power ends up being over cultural issues that have been turned into dominant themes in politics.
03:20I mean, they should not be dominant themes.
03:22Indeed. And just very briefly, of course, the Swiss government is saying that foreign workers are needed,
03:27but the foreign-born population has risen rapidly, hasn't it, in Switzerland?
03:31And this backlash against foreign migration, at least in the far right,
03:37is that anything particularly new, though?
03:40And does it reflect what we're really seeing across Europe, this rising tide of nationalism?
03:46The difference here is how a measure that is so aggressive and so, I would argue,
03:56Hitlerian became nearly a policy-making tool in the hands of a political entity
04:02that is trying to demonize the migration in Switzerland.
04:07Other parts of the far right in Europe don't have that kind of power,
04:12but because of the Swiss system, the referendum can be proposed by political parties across the spectrum.
04:18The fact that this referendum took place shows us what could happen if the far right comes to power.
04:25And that applies to most German-speaking countries like Austria, Germany.
04:30Germany, Switzerland, I think, is trying to somehow deal with the questions that the far right poses,
04:39like, do we want this or do we basically reject it?
04:43In this case, they rejected it, but the majority, of course, was tiny.
04:47And it also shows that the far right has the power to proceed with having a say in the policy
04:54-making agenda,
04:55even if that is financially disastrous.
04:58Dr. Georges Samaras, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at King's College London,
05:02thank you very much for sharing your insights with us.
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