Switzerland’s right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) has secured an election victory, after a campaign which featured slogans such as "Asylum seeker rapes woman – is this the new normal?"

In general elections on Sunday (October 22), the SVP took 29 percent of the vote in the lower house of parliament, improving its vote share by more than three percentage points. The party now has 62 seats in the 200 member National Council, nine more than it had before.

The SVP has been the party with the most votes in Switzerland for more than 20 years. Its campaign in the lead up to the election focused on opposing "mass immigration" and the prospect of the Swiss population reaching 10 million. It argued that migrants were responsible for rising crime rates, also attacking "cancel culture" and what it called "gender terror and woke madness."

Also read: Switzerland's biggest party wants asylum procedures relocated abroad

Clear mandate

Speaking on the national broadcastser RTS, SVP president Marco Chiesa said: "We have received a very clear mandate from the Swiss population to put on the table issues which matter to them, such as illegal immigration."

Thomas Aeschi, head of the SVP parliamentary group, told the news agency AFP: "The situation in Switzerland is serious: we have mass immigration, we have big problems with people seeking asylum. The security situation is no longer the same as before."

Also read: Switzerland records uptick in irregular entries

In addition to reflecting public concerns about migration, the outcome – which saw major losses for the Greens and the Liberal Greens – is also being seen as a rejection of parties representing out-of-touch elites.

According to Damir Skenderovic, history professor at the University of Fribourg, the party anticipated much of what populist parties such as the AfD in Germany and parties in Scandinavia are now doing: "the style of posing as the voice of the people, the little people, addressing issues such as migration and asylum, and putting up provocative campaign posters," he told the dpa news agency.

AFP, Reuters, dpa