Switzerland's Blocher crows as move to halt political asylum almost succeeds

The votes of just 3,422 people – one in 647 of those polled, or 1.6 per cent – saved the face of the Swiss government on Sunday, when a radical proposal to ban all asylum-seekers arriving overland except those with independent means was rejected by a whisker.

The Swiss People's Party, led by Christoph Blocher, a blunt-spoken multimillionaire industrialist, had obtained the 100,000 signatures required to put the issue to a referendum in 1999, during the war in Kosovo, when more than 24,000 refugees from the war poured into the country in four months.

Three years on, the 49 per cent of voters who endorsed the proposal have sent a strong message to the government. One Swiss commentator said: "Politicians, intellectuals, professionals, all the nice people, say we have to accept people from all over the world, we have to integrate them, give them jobs, houses, education, pocket money. But it's a completely different reality down there. If you are an ordinary Swiss guy raising a family in Zurich, and your kids are not getting a proper education because half the kids in the class are not Swiss but from former Yugoslavia, so the teacher is busy teaching them German and taking their knives away – then you have open ears for what Mr Blocher has to say."

The margin of failure of the People's Party's proposal was so narrow that if this were Florida they would be talking dimpled chads and recounts. But coming on top of an earlier referendum failure to keep Switzerland out of the United Nations, it is taken by some to indicate that the far right has now peaked in Switzerland.

In Austria, infighting within the far right brought about a collapse in support for Jörg Haider; one week before, the Dutch coalition government collapsed after a mere three months, victim of a power struggle between the ideological heirs of the murdered gay far right populist Pim Fortuyn. But to conclude that the threat of the far right's ascendancy in Europe is past would be hasty.

In Switzerland, after Sunday night's result, Ruth Metzler, the Justice Minister, said she was "enormously relieved". She said: "Switzerland can continue with a humanitarian asylum policy. As one of the richest nations in the world, it would have reflected very badly on us if we became the first to deny the right to asylum."

But Mr Blocher was euphoric. "The outcome of the vote is sensational. We were on our own against the cabinet, all the other parties, against the media and yet we finally only lost by a handful of votes," he said.

The press agreed. "The People's Party triumphant in defeat," said Le Temps of Geneva yesterday. "Metzler lost" echoed Blick, another daily.

The People's Party won 15 seats at the general election in 1999 – doubling its representation – and already has one cabinet seat. Now Mr Blocher hopes for bigger gains next year and a cabinet seat for himself. If other European countries are anything to go by, that could be his undoing. The fate of Jörg Haider and of Pim Fortuyn's supporters shows that parties which rise on a surge of anti-immigrant emotion can fail badly and quickly once forced to wrestle with the realities of power. In Italy, too, Umberto Bossi's anti-immigrant Northern League is struggling in the ruling coalition as its chauvinistic agenda is diluted and postponed.

Yet the larger lesson of Switzerland's result is that across Europe much of the electorate can now be mobilised to vote against immigration. And politicians from Blair to Berlusconi, grasping that fact, are competing to become the most hostile to would-be migrants.

But how will Europe square this harsh new consensus with the need to bring in workers to compensate for declining birth rates? It's the political conundrum of the age.