All this changed once Christoph Blocher (SVP Zürich), one of Switzerland's richest entrepreneurs, established himself as Switzerland's leading – and most controversial – politician. Under his leadership, the SVP morphed into a right-wing populist party, promoting itself as a the defender of Swiss sovereignty (against the EU) and national pride (against foreign and domestic detractors questioning Switzerland's less than stellar role during the Second World War). But above all, the party made its mark as a staunch critic of Switzerland's migration policy. Charging that the country had lost control over immigration, the SVP called for "measured immigration" by severely curtailing the influx of migrants of all provenance, but particularly Muslim countries. Claiming that Islam was incompatible with Switzerland's constitution and Rechtsstaat, the party made it its avowed goal to strictly limit Islam's impact on Swiss society and culture. It was in this spirit that the party – initially rather reluctantly -– supported the anti-minaret initiative, which Swiss voters passed by a slim majority in 2009. [...]
The Swiss case suggests that the right-wing populist insurgency that has occurred throughout western liberal democracies over the past several decades has little to do with promoting "more democracy" – a legitimate demand given the pervasiveness of technocracy and TINA; rather, it has a lot to do with reversing, once and for all, what the right considers the nefarious influence of 1968, which in their view has undermined traditions and poisoned the moral fabric of western democracies. The objective is once and for all to defeat the post-68 left and regain the strategic heights with respect to the production of meaning – what the Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (persecuted and imprisoned under Mussolini) once referred to as "cultural hegemony" and what in German is known as Deutungshoheit (power of interpretation).
In recent years, it has become blatantly obvious that meaning is subject to profound struggles and conflicts. The spectacular career of the notion of "fake news" as a major new field of contestation is perhaps the clearest reflection of the central importance of interpretation in contemporary politics. Recent studies on the latest wave of the right-wing populist upsurge suggest that culture rather than economics is at the center of contemporary right-wing populist mobilizations. Right-wing populist voters are less concerned about unemployment, cheap imports from emerging economies such as China or having to compete with low-wage workers than about the dissolution of familiar life-worlds and a shared identity. What gets them riled up are not so much T-shirts made in Vietnam and hawked in neighborhood shopping malls as mosques and minarets disturbing the idyllic skyline of small-town Switzerland, Austria, and elsewhere. [...]
None of these developments has anything to do with the ‘68 generation. They are rather the result of local governments and administrations eager to attract companies and international organizations in order to increase their revenue base by offering them all kinds of tax incentives. SVP politicians have been as complicit in promoting excessive development with all of its negative consequences as have been the politicians of other parties. The frustration, anger, indignation and resentment provoked by the results, however, have primarily benefited the SVP, which in turn has used its electoral capital not to address the country's real problems, largely linked to excessive development, but to promoting anti-‘68 nostalgia for a world that seems irretrievably lost.
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