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- For the referendum vote on the Hunting Law, 646 advertisements appeared in the print media in the last two months.
- That is more than any other of the five proposals that will be voted on in ten days.
- Most of the ads, namely 538, campaigned for a no to the hunting law, 108 for a yes.
The initiative against the free movement of persons is second on the list of announcements with 397 announcements. Here, too, most of the ads come from the opposite side. This is demonstrated by a current analysis of newspapers and advertisements from the Political Yearbook (“Année Politique Suisse”) of the Institute of Political Sciences of the University of Bern.
Swiss Political Year, Institut Politikwissenschaft Uni Bern
In view of the importance attached to the SVP initiative in newspapers and magazines, the number of advertisements is comparatively small, notes “Année Politique Suisse”. It falls far short of the number of ads that ran as part of the campaign for the mass immigration initiative at the time.
Templates for paternity leave and the acquisition of fighter jets were also advertised below average. There were only nine newspaper and magazine ads for filing tax deductions for third party child care costs.
Significantly more advertisements were placed on the hunting law than on the so-called limitation initiative, although it received much more attention in all media reports. The “Année Politique Suisse” analyzes the number of announcements of voting proposals since 2013. With 646 announcements, the Hunting Law ranks seventh of all documents analyzed since 2013.
When it comes to reporting in the print media, a different picture emerges: the limitation initiative is getting much more attention than the other four templates. In a long-term comparison in print media, the template for children’s prints is virtually unanswerable.
Almost 400 announcements of the initiative against the free movement of persons were published. However, this is significantly less than previous SVP initiatives, such as the Mass Immigration Initiative in 2014 with 904 ads or the Self-Determination Initiative in 2018 with 682 ads.
For paternity leave (134 ads) and fighter jets (120 ads), there were roughly the same number or the same number of ads. In 2014, in the run-up to the vote on the acquisition of the Gripen fighter jet (297 announcements), significantly more announcements were published.
Significantly stronger ad-free campaign
With both the hunting law and the limitation initiative, significantly more negative than positive ads were placed. Only when it comes to acquiring fighter jets does the pro side advertise itself more strongly than its opponents.
In the Hunting Law, announcements of the contra come from a powerful committee, made up of animal and nature conservation associations, green left parties, and some representatives of hunters, forestry and agriculture.
A committee under the name “stark + vernetzt”, consisting of an association of various organizations led by Economiesuisse, is primarily responsible for the no-ads limitation initiative.
