MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ESSAY

ZURICH - Switzerland stunned many Europeans, including not a few Swiss, when near the end of last year the country, by referendum, banned the building of minarets. Much reproof ensued about Swiss xenophobia, even though surveys showed similar plebiscites would get pretty much the same results elsewhere.

A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus. “We make posters, the other side goes to the judge,” is how Alexander Segert put it. “I love it when they do that.”

He designed the poster in question. As manager of Goal, the public relations firm for the Swiss People’s Party, Mr. Segert has overseen various campaign posters. This one, for the referendum, used minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles . Beside the missiles a woman glowers from inside a niqab. “Stop” is written below in big, fire-engine-red letters.

The obvious message: Minarets lead to Sharia law. Never mind that there are only four minarets in Switzerland to begin with, and that Muslims, some 340,000 of them, or 4 percent of the population, mostly from the Balkans and Turkey, have never been notably zealous.

In this heavily immigrant country the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party is now the leading political party . But all across Europe populist parties are growing, capitalizing on a very oldfashioned brand of propaganda art.

It manages, if often just barely, to skirt racism laws. In Italy, where attacks on immigrant workers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno this month incited the country’s worst riots in years, the Lega Nord, part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, has circulated various anti-immigrant posters. One, mimicked by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front Party in France, showed an American Indian to make the point that immigrants would soon turn Europeans into embattled minorities stuck on reservations.

The National Front also distributed a poster of Charles de Gaulle alongside a remark he once made . “It is good that there are yellow Frenchmen and black Frenchmen and brown Frenchmen,” de Gaulle is quoted as saying. “They prove that France is open to all races,” adding, “on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France will no longer be France.”

In Austria the far-right Freedom Party has come up with a poster bearing the slangy slogan “Daham Statt Islam, Wir Fur Euch” (roughly, Home Instead of Islam, or Islam Go Home, We Are for You). And Britain’s neo-Nazi National Party swiped the minaret poster by switching the Swiss flag for a Union Jack. Mr. Segert and the Swiss People’s Party weren’t too pleased, populists being one thing, neo- Nazis another.

Mr. Segert is the de facto reigning minister of such propaganda. Before the minaret poster, he cooked up the idea of three fluffy white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag. “For More Security” was the accompanying slogan.

Cries of racism, occasional legal proceedings - none of which ended up in fines against him - and even bans on their display in left-leaning cities like Basel and Geneva, have only increased the reproduction of the images. All of which, as Mr. Segert said, suits him and his bosses just fine.

“If what we do stirs up controversy, then we’ve already won the election,” he told me.

“Fifty percent Stalin, 50 percent Norman Rockwell,” was the assessment of Marc Buhlmann, a political scientist here. “The images are aggressive, not funny, without charm, straight to the point, clear and” - he was speaking aesthetically here - “in no way radical. They’re the opposite of most advertising today. They aim just at their target audience.”

Mr. Segert, a 46-year-old German (yes, an immigrant himself in Switzerland), is the father of two adopted children from North Africa, although he declined to talk about his personal life. He was happy, on the other hand, to discuss work, which he volunteered he would gladly do for the Green Party or Social Democrats, if they hired him. “For me it’s an intellectual exercise,” he said, as if cynicism were a point of professional pride.

He added, “We’re successful because we know how to reduce information to the lowest level, so people respond without thinking.”

ALT= HSPACE=5 VSPACE=0 BORDER=0>Above, a poster protested the construction of minarets in Switzerland. Others expressed anti-immigration themes in Switzerland, bottom, and France. / GOAL AG