The Swiss are not hasty: They’ve had a European Union membership application idling for 24 years. The Swiss government stopped pursuing it when the Swiss people rejected it in a 1992 resolution. (It was close.) The upper house of the Swiss legislature just voted to formally withdraw the application, the lower house already having done so.
The largest single party in the Swiss national assembly today is the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which is Euro-skeptical and anti-immigration. It’s basically the Keep Switzerland Swiss Party. It isn’t subtle: Its most famous campaign poster depicts a group of white sheep kicking a black sheep across the border out of Switzerland. The caption reads: “Sicherheit schaffen; mein Zuhause — unsere Schweiz,” “Establish safety; my home — our Switzerland.”
In the United Kingdom, the campaign to leave the European Union is ahead in five recent polls.
In France, the heart of the European Union, Euro-skepticism is on the rise.
From Pew polling:
EU favorability is down in five of the six nations surveyed in both 2015 and 2016. There has been a double-digit drop in France (down 17 percentage points) and Spain (16 points), and single-digit declines in Germany (8 points), the United Kingdom (7 points) and Italy (6 points).
We have different countries for a reason. Some people seem to be remembering why that is.
Switzerland vs. the European Union -- and France, too?