THE GUARDIAN: Christoph Blocher's party is the largest in Switzerland but its noisy broadsides against immigrants and crime have caused deep divisions ahead of next week's elections. Peter Beaumont reports from Bern
'It's not like we're England,' said the old woman sharing a flask of coffee with her middle-aged daughter on the train from Geneva to Zurich. 'They had the colonies, and we didn't,' she adds, to explain the nature of Britain's racial mix and why Switzerland does not need one. Her daughter considers this for a moment. 'I worry,' she says, 'there will be a putsch against him.'
The him in question is Christoph Blocher, the populist and right-wing leader of the Swiss People's party (the UDC): lawyer, industrialist, admirer of Winston Churchill, collector of mawkish Swiss art and, if his opponents and critics are to be believed, a man with leanings towards the fascist fringe of the right.
And a week today, if Swiss pollster GfS has done its work correctly, the Swiss electorate will return his party again as the largest, with 27 per cent of the vote.
Blocher is the man that one newspaper columnist for 24 Heures - with some irony - dubbed last week the 'Lider Maximo' after Fidel Castro, and whom a cabinet colleague once labelled Il Duce. Everywhere Blocher goes, he polarises Swiss society. His posters appear to have been the only ones vandalised during the campaign. In Bern, where anti-Blocher marchers caused a riot last weekend by stopping the UDC marching through the city, his face has been scrawled out or covered with a drawing showing a black sheep urinating into his grinning mouth. Hard right's hero shakes up cosy world of Swiss politics (more)
Audio: Mathias Muller, an official from the Swiss People's Party (the UDC) talks to Peter Beaumont about accusations of a swing to the right
Mark Alexander
