The New York Times reported yesterday on disturbing xenophobia in Swiss politics, focusing on a poster distributed by a leading ultra-right party:

The posters taped on the walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland’s national electoral campaign: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag as one of them kicks a single black sheep away.

A poster at a rally for the Swiss People’s Party showed a white sheep kicking out a black one.

“To Create Security,” the poster reads.

The poster is not the creation of a fringe movement, but of the most powerful party in Switzerland’s federal Parliament and a member of the coalition government, an extreme right-wing party called the Swiss People’s Party, or SVP. It has been distributed in a mass mailing to Swiss households, reproduced in newspapers and magazines and hung as huge billboards across the country.

However, they only show the poster in the background of one of the pictures that accompanied the story, so I thought it was worth including the full image here:

It’s important that we remember what xenophobia and intolerance look like.