Those posters (the first two anyway) came from the largest and most powerful swiss political party. I don't mean to say that the swiss are racist, but we can safely say that there is quite serious tension in any country whose largest party is putting out posters with white sheep kicking out black sheep.

Any swiss people reading: does the phrase "black sheep" have the same meaning in the various swiss languages as it does in english?

I remember reading from an SVP/UDC official that they picked the black sheep imagery not because it is racist, no no, how dare you, but precisely because the expression works in all national languages.

Yes, it means the same like in English.

There were people from the far left wing that tried to establish that it was meant literally, which would then become racist. But that looked so far fetched that it wasn't part of the official strategy of the far left parties.

...it's racist no matter what. It has a connotation (even if it's unintentional which I entirely doubt) of racism, and the overt message (our unifed in-group needs to expel members of this out-group from our space) is racist.

I literally do not see how you could look at this and not see racism. Is your concept of racism limited to overt statements of the form "People whose skin colours are different from mine are bad"?

Expelling criminals (which was the topic of the referendum) is racist?

I always asked myself how one can misinterpret such a widely used metaphor (except intentionally).

Because when their posters aren't urging people to say no to black sheep, they're asking them to say no to... people that have brown skin?

http://vincentarsenault.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/suisse-u... http://voixdexils.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/udc_ok2.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-44n7Zc5xJdM/TigsGejS9LI/AAAAAAAAAH...

In fairness to the UDP, they do also appear to have a poster design involving nice, happy, multi-racial Swiss people holding hands, but I bet the ones involving saying NON to scary dark foreign things (and there are a lot of designs that fit this pattern which don't involve sheep metaphors) appear on more billboards.

When even the Daily Mail - the most-widely read source of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the UK - observes that your campaigns look like they might be jumping on popular racist sentiment, they probably are http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-480493/Proposed-Swis...

The whole point of a metaphor is that it means two things at once, and each reinforces the other. Did this not come up?

(BTW if it were meant literally it would be a poster concerning the aesthetics of animal husbandry. Presumably nobody was arguing this.)

Yes for the german speaking part. I can't say for the other languages. And these posters stirred quite a controversy back when they were put up.

Edit: seeing as the first poster is in french, I'd guess it means the same there too.

No, but the party whose logo is on the posters did get voted by the general Swiss population to 54 out of 200 National Council seats...