Swiss Referendum Approves Free Movement of EU Citizens

An election poster of the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP) showing three crows surrounding Switzerland and reading in French: 'Open doors for abuse? NO!' is seen in Chavannes near Lausanne, western of Switzerland on January 5, 2009. Despite deepening (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)

SOFIA, Bulgaria—The majority of Swiss people voted “Yes” on a referendum on Feb. 8 and approved the extension of an agreement for a free movement of workers from the European Union on its territory, this time including the newly admitted member states—Bulgaria and Romania. This means that from now on workers from all EU member states can live and work freely in Switzerland, although the country is not itself an EU member.

The official results of the vote announced by the Swiss news agency ATS showed that 59.6 percent from the population (1,517,516) of the country said “yes” to the enlargement of the Swiss-EU economical cooperation while 1,027,644 voted against: 22 out of total 26 Swiss cantons approved the decision.

According to AFP, the results were quite surprising taking into consideration the aggressive antagonistic campaign launched by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which published a poster on which Bulgarian and Romanian workers were portrayed as black crows biting the country and called the two countries “Europe’s third world.”

But if the country had chosen to vote “No,” six important economic agreements with the EU would have been annulled. According to official data, these bilateral conventions bring Switzerland one million Swiss francs ($861,104) a day from the economic exchange with the Union.

“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,” Swiss President and Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf Merz said for AFP.

The former ambassador of Bulgaria to Switzerland, Lea Cohen, quoted by Novinite.com, pointed out that workers from the new members of the EU would not pose a threat to Switzerland by triggering a crime wave, because the two countries are not in the list of those with high crime rates.

She added that Bulgarians will also not flood the Swiss labor market due to the ongoing economic crisis and increasing unemployment. What is more, Bulgarians had so far shown affinity to Spain and Great Britain rather than Switzerland. According to her, there are not more than 1,000 Bulgarian immigrants in the country.

According to statistical data Romanians prefer Spain and Italy.

Since 2002, nearly 200,000 EU citizens have moved to Switzerland with the intention to work. Around 20 percent of the population of the country consists of foreigners. In the last decades Ukrainian and Portuguese citizens have represented large immigrant communities. The number of former-Yugoslavians has also been rising.