Operation Libero – the SVP of the progressives

Playing on the person is a specialty of the SVP. Energy Minister Simonetta Sommaruga was hit on Monday. It would be better to hand over your dossiers to Ueli Maurer, said Thomas Aeschi, parliamentary group leader, in an interview with the Tamedia newspapers. Maurer would get the energy crisis under control faster than the social democrat.

Personalization has a system at the largest party in Switzerland. In 2016, the former Zurich Minister of Finance Ursula Gut was shown as a tricky shell player. A subject that the SVP house recruiter Alexander Segert would use again years later with the then German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Advertising, including political ones, thrives on breaking the rules. No party knows this better than the SVP. But she is also aware that provocation and crossing borders are not without risk. Especially in Switzerland, this system based on concordance and the protection of minorities, the sensitivities are great. Citizens don’t particularly like personal attacks. That’s why the SVP mostly polemicizes against groups and vague threats instead of against individuals with their stabbing, sheep and boot posters.

Apparently, getting personal has its appeal, and Operation Libero is currently savoring this appeal. The self-proclaimed movement for “openness to the world and a sense of European belonging”, the spearhead of progressive civil society, is targeting Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis. It is said that he is not moving forward with enough determination in the Europe dossier, is to blame for the breakdown in negotiations with the EU and is generally procrastinating.

In order to advertise its own European initiative, the organization relies on an Internet campaign in which it has given Cassis a place of honor. Operation Libero is currently making posts on portals such as Facebook and Twitter in which the Federal Council’s European policy in general and the role of the foreign minister in particular are castigated.

To illustrate the criticism, the movement relies on visual messages, so-called memes. One shows Federal President Cassis playing the guitar while the hut around him is on fire. The picture is captioned “This is fine”.

Those responsible for the campaign at Operation Libero already received negative comments on this message. But they lashed out again. This time they showed Cassis as a blond pigtailed “Little Miss” under the heading “European policy failure”.

Operation Libero thus refers to a popular meme trend. The “Little Miss” is a character from a British children’s book series from the 1970s that was rediscovered on channels such as Tiktok and Instagram. In the original books, she is given changing character traits: “Little Miss Sunshine”, “Little Miss Wise”. In its modern version, it is used to draw attention to the character traits of prominent personalities (“Little Miss knows it all”) or to point out special characteristics (“Little Miss only drinks her red wine ice-cold”).

Only she herself knows why Operation Libero came up with the idea of ​​jumping on the Little Miss Nonsense bandwagon. The tip against the foreign minister is embarrassing, pathetic and arrogant, they say.

Instead of spurring on the Europe debate, the “Movement for a cosmopolitan and forward-looking Switzerland” has made itself the SVP of the progressives. This realization must hurt her even more than the fact that her audience knows Ignazio Cassis but has never heard of the little Miss.