Animosity In The Alps.(Giving Globally)(World Affairs)(xenophobia in Switzerland; Swiss People's Party)

Byline: William Underhill and Tracy McNicoll; With Jessica Au In London

In peaceful Switzerland, xenophobia is thriving.

The image is simple but striking: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag, while a fourth -- a black one -- is booted away. The caption: "For greater security." But the message is hotly debated. The Swiss People's Party (SVP) which put up about 200,000 copies of the poster in the runup to the October parliamentary elections, says the poster promotes the party's plan to deport foreigners convicted of crimes. Others say it promotes racism. Andrew Katumba, a naturalized Swiss with a Ugandan father, now standing for parliament as a Social Democrat, says "the symbolism is awful and unacceptable."

Europe is seeing such controversies more and more often, as parties on the far right and left attack a "rising tide" of immigrants from Africa and the East. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has helped the Danish People's Party emerge as an influential force with a rising share of the vote. The new right-wing Freedom Party is gaining ground in the Netherlands on a similar platform. And in France, National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's popularity rose to 31 percent in April. But the Swiss case is different. The SVP is an established power with the largest number of seats in Parliament. Small wonder, then, that its black-sheep campaign has drawn condemnation from the United Nations' special rapporteur on racism, who says it "provokes racial and religious hatred" and should be withdrawn to restore "the image of Switzerland as a country respectful of human rights."

But the SVP's experience shows that at least in Switzerland, an aggressive anti-immigrant line plays well. In 2003, the party abandoned the traditional confrontation-lite approach to campaigning in favor of a harsh populist message. Result: a rare upheaval in Swiss politics. The SVP, once sidelined as a largely rural party, won 26 percent of the vote, raising its tally of M.P.s by nearly half and earning it a second seat on the ruling seven-member Federal Council, at the expense of the Social Democrats. Its charismatic leader, Christoph Blocher, serves in the influential post of justice minister. And the party is now proposing initiatives that include a ban on minarets on mosques, which SVP parliamentarian Ulrich Schluer decries as the Muslim symbol of a demand for "power that calls ...