Nein!

Once again, I can tell it's time for a referendum here because the political posters have gone up all over town. As usual, the most eye-catching are the ones by the populist/right-wing party, this time featuring Japanese anime-style faces filled with terror. (I've been meaning to post about this for a while but was beaten to the punch. Damn!) What are they so afraid of? Opening the borders, evidently. They're not really my borders so I'm in no position to say one way or another how the good citizens of my temporary home want to interact with the outside world, but the posters really play to the basest of human instinct. You'd think voting "yes" to Schengen would mean that every Swiss job would be lost to cheap foreign labor and that Eastern European mafiosi and al-Qaeda operatives would relocate to the Alps.

The other thing that will evidently be on the ballot is domestic partnerships. The arguments are probably not that different from back home, but at least the visuals for both pro and con aren't nearly as offensive/scaremongering as opening the borders. (Although the anti posters say something like "The next demand is already there: adoption and artifical fertilization for gay and lesbian couples", so the scaremongering is more textual than visual.)