The aim of this chapter is to study the interactions between Switzerland’s mainstream
parties and the Swiss People’s Party (SVP). Since 1999, the SVP has become the largest
party in the country and it is currently the Western European populist radical right
party with the largest vote share. An additional characteristic of the SVP is that it has
never been a ‘niche’ party, nor an ‘outsider’. Indeed, the party has been constantly
represented in the federal government during the last decades, while continuing to
exploit the tools provided by direct democracy for its own purposes. In this chapter, we
cover a wide time span (1992–2018) and focus on the SVP’s core issues: immigration,
law and order, and European integration. Our results show that the traditional
mainstream parties adopted a variety of different strategies vis-à-vis the SVP, thereby
mixing cooperation, co-optation, clashing, and dismissive strategies. Whilst cooptation
developed into the dominant approach as far as immigration and law and
order were concerned, clashing strategies became increasingly important when it came
to European integration. However, as a rule mainstream parties could not avoid
collaborative strategies entirely, given that the SVP was their partner in government.