As the Democratic Party had represented centrist, social-liberal positions, the course of the SVP shifted towards the political centre following internal debates. The Democratic Party had been supported particularly by workers, and the SVP sought to expand its electoral base towards these, as the traditional BGB base in the rural population had started to lose its importance in the post-war era. In 1971, the BGB changed its name to the Swiss People's Party (SVP) after it merged with the Democratic Party from Glarus and Graubünden.
Svp stands for free#
The party continued to be a reliable political partner with the Swiss Conservative People's Party and the Free Democratic Party. After World War II, the BGB contributed to the establishment of the characteristic Swiss post-war consensual politics, social agreements and economic growth policies. In the party's fight against left-wing ideologies, sections of party officials and farmers voiced sympathy with, or failed to distance themselves from the emerging fascist movements. The BGB contributed strongly to the establishment of the Swiss national ideology known as the Geistige Landesverteidigung (Spiritual Defence of the Nation), which was largely responsible for the growing Swiss sociocultural and political cohesion from the 1930s. While the party opposed any kind of socialist ideas such as internationalism and anti-militarism, it sought to represent local Swiss traders and farmers against big business and international capital.
During the 1930s, the BGB entered the mainstream of Swiss politics as a right-wing conservative party in the bourgeois bloc. In 1936, a representative party was founded on the national level, called the Party of Farmers, Traders and Independents (BGB). By 1929, the coalition of farmers' parties had gained enough influence to get one of their leaders, Rudolf Minger, elected to the Federal Council. When proportional representation was introduced in 1919, the new farmers' parties won significant electoral support, especially in Zürich and Bern, and eventually also gained representation in parliament and government. While the Free Democratic Party had earlier been a popular party for farmers, this changed during World War I when the party had mainly defended the interests of industrialists and consumer circles. The early origins of the SVP go back to the late 1910s, when numerous cantonal farmers' parties were founded in agrarian, Protestant, German-speaking parts of Switzerland. 1.3 Rise of the new SVP (1990s–present).
It has six seats in the Council of States.
As of 2019, the party is the largest in the National Council with 53 seats. Blocher's failure to win re-election as a Federal Councillor led to moderates within the party splitting to form the Conservative Democratic Party (BDP). Its vote share of 28.9% in the 2007 Federal Council election was the highest vote ever recorded for a single party in Switzerland until 2015, when it surpassed its own record with 29.4%. In line with the changes fostered by Blocher, the party started to focus increasingly on issues such as Euroscepticism and opposition to mass immigration. This changed however during the 1990s, when the party underwent deep structural and ideological changes under the influence of Christoph Blocher the SVP then became the strongest party in Switzerland by the 2000s. The SVP initially did not enjoy any increased support beyond that of the BGB, retaining around 11% of the vote through the 1970s and 1980s. The SVP originated in 1971 as a merger of the Party of Farmers, Traders and Independents (BGB) and the Democratic Party, while the BGB, in turn, had been founded in the context of the emerging local farmers' parties in the late 1910s. Chaired by Marco Chiesa, it is the largest party in the Federal Assembly, with 53 members of the National Council and 6 of the Council of States. The Swiss People's Party ( German: Schweizerische Volkspartei, SVP Romansh: Partida populara Svizra, PPS), also known as the Democratic Union of the Centre ( French: Union démocratique du centre, UDC Italian: Unione Democratica di Centro, UDC), is a national-conservative, right-wing populist political party in Switzerland.
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