Last month, just days after the first World Cup games kicked off, voters in Switzerland weighed in on an initiative from the right-wing Swiss People\u2019s Party that would have capped Switzerland\u2019s population at 10 million people until 2050. Under the proposal, a series of strict immigration controls would come into place as soon as the population crossed the 9.5 million mark. (It\u2019s currently around 9.1 million.)<\/p>\n

The vote came as the country\u2019s national team took the field reflecting one of the soccer world\u2019s most ethnically diverse player pools. Sixteen of the 26 players, or 62 percent of the team, have family roots from abroad, according to data compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace<\/a>. (Only France, England, Canada and Australia had higher percentages in that category.) Three of Switzerland\u2019s 26 players were born abroad themselves.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a distinctive feature of Swiss politics \u2014 and its robust system of direct democracy<\/a> \u2014 that proposals like the \u201cNo to a Switzerland with 10 million!\u201d initiative appear directly before voters. As often as four times a year, voters are confronted with federal, state and local proposals. (In 2024, they even weighed in on whether to ax public funding for Eurovision<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

In the end, 55 percent of voters rejected the initiative<\/a>. For the time being the question of Switzerland\u2019s multiculturalism will be on the field but off the table.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Foreign-born players are increasingly a fixture of teams across the World Cup. In Switzerland, which faces off against Algeria tonight, the politics of a progressively diverse population have literally been on the ballot as the tournament unfolds. Last month, just days after the first World Cup games kicked off, voters in Switzerland weighed in on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}