yesterday’s tagesanzeiger report on a parliamentary motion of the swiss conservatives right-wing, nationalist party SVP to prepare the annexation of all regions surrounding switzerland — no, today’s not the first of april.

interesting.

as the tagesanzeiger rightly observes that would add about 10 million germans to the population (plus almost another million german speaking citizens of alsace, vorarlberg, & bolzano) — just a couple of months ago the SVP, never afraid of playing the lowest available instruments of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, staged a campaign claiming that the ETH was being overtaken by german professors (skillfully representing sliced statistics to “prove” their point).

according to the tagesanzeiger, the german embassy in bern when asked for comment, was just laughing out loud. probably the best reaction to any of the SVP motions…

…except, perhaps there’s more behind this, as der schweizer narr writes: right-wing politicians in switzerland and elsewhere in europe are voicing their opininon that the EU is doomed to fail and that we are currently seeing the beginning of the end of the EU — the SVP motion could be interpreted to play the separatist tune and try and solicit resonance from similarly minded circles in those surrounding regions.

is there method to the madness?