Swiss voters went to the polls yesterday to decide whether or not to continue to allow unrestricted immigration from the EU, with the country’s ties with its European neighbors hanging in the balance.
Postal voting has already begun on the government’s attempt to prolong an accord on free movement of labor — which also provides some 400,000 Swiss migrants unrestricted access to jobs in the EU — and to extend it to the bloc’s most recent members, Bulgaria and Romania.
Campaigning has pitted non-member Switzerland’s economic interests against traditional popular fears about immigration and the neutral Alpine nation’s prized independence.
More than 1 million of the country’s 1.62 million foreign residents come from the EU and western Europe. Their number has surged by nearly 200,000 since limits on employing EU citizens were gradually lifted from 2002, helping to fuel a Swiss economic boom until last year.
Swiss President and Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf Merz recently warned that a “no” vote could topple the pile of bilateral accords, including transport, education and agriculture, that underpin an often tetchy relationship with the EU.
Those agreements also ease an estimated 1 billion Swiss francs (US$860 million) a day in economic exchanges with Switzerland’s top trade partner, official data showed.
“Our country is opposed to membership, but we recognize that we wouldn’t be able to go it alone without ending up in complete isolation, and we couldn’t afford that,” Merz said.
While the latest move is actively backed by the bulk of the Swiss political, business and social establishment, popular support has been timid.
In the last opinion poll released by Swiss state television on Jan. 28, just 50 percent of those polled supported the motion.
However, 43 percent rejected it and 7 percent were undecided, marking a marginal gain for opponents in a month and only a slender advantage for pro-Europeans.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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