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.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious