SVP election placard hangs with a graffiti on it readying "To Hell With Fascists " (AFP)

GENEVA, October 19 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – As Swiss cast their ballots Sunday, October 19, to elect new members to the 200-seat National Council, the lower house of parliament, opinion polls expected the hard right Swiss People's Party (SVP) to get the lion's share of seats in the new legislature.

The SVP, which attracted both support and criticism for its xenophobic rhetoric, controlled 45 seats in the outgoing parliament.

Though the final results not due until Monday, October 20, the SVP is expected to gain three percentage points compared to the 1999 parliamentary election, capturing 25 percent of the vote on the back of an anti-asylum, anti-Europe and low-tax campaign, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

If predictions are confirmed, the SVP, once the smallest of the four parties in government, would sweep up seven more seats to make it the largest single party in the National Council for the first time, according to a survey for the Basler Zeitung newspaper.

Christoph Blocher, the SVP's leading politician, was confident his hard-line approach, particularly towards immigrants, would seduce more voters.

"In Geneva it is just as bad as Zurich. Francophone Africans prefer to live there because people speak French. For this sort of reason, people in French-speaking Switzerland are starting to move," he recently told the weekly magazine Illustre.

Switzerland's four main political parties share power in the government, the seven-member Federal Council, with each have two seats, except the SVP with just one.

"After our electoral success four years ago we were under an obligation to demand a second post," Blocher said.

"It is highly likely the SVP will command more of the political debate in Switzerland tomorrow than it does today," predicted the daily Le Temps Saturday.

The far-right party is expected to demand a second seat in the seven-member cabinet - breaking the coalition which has governed Switzerland for almost 50 years.

Xenophobia Mongers

SVP opponents accused the party of trying to encourage latent xenophobia among more insecure Swiss voters afraid of crime.

"The SVP does not appeal to reason but to fear. It fans resentment and arouses fears to mask its own contradictions," Christian Democrat parliamentarian Jean Phillipe Maitre said.

In the closing days of a fairly lackluster campaign, the SVP triggered controversy with press adverts slamming "pampered criminals, unabashed asylum seekers, a brutal Albanian mafia" and claiming that "black Africans" were among ethnic groups which dominate drugs smuggling.

This prompted legal action from an anti-racism group last week and sparked a stern reaction from the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) which sharply criticized the far-right party's attempt to blame the crime rate on asylum seekers.

"From what we have seen it includes some of the most nakedly anti-asylum advertisements by a major political party that we've seen in Europe to date," said  UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond.

In November 2002, a proposal by the SVP which would effectively have closed the door on a majority of asylum seekers, was rejected by just 50.1 percent.

Some 4.7 million people were eligible to vote in the heavily decentralized election, with polling booths opening earlier in the week in some of the 26 cantons or regions and many Swiss voting in the postal ballot before election day.

All 200 seats in the lower house were being elected as well as 41 of the 46 seats in the upper house, the Council of States.

The centre-right Radical (FDP) and Christian Democratic (CVP) parties were predicted to lose ground with 34 percent of voting intentions between them.

The Social Democrats (SDP) were seen winning a steady 23 percent, by appealing to concerns about rising unemployment, pensions and the recession-plagued economy, polls indicated.