Just because some crazy people created very offensive posters, we shouldn't assume that the general swiss population is so anti-immigration (and racist).
Any swiss people reading: does the phrase "black sheep" have the same meaning in the various swiss languages as it does in english?
Edit: seeing as the first poster is in french, I'd guess it means the same there too.
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.
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"?
I always asked myself how one can misinterpret such a widely used metaphor (except intentionally).
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...
(BTW if it were meant literally it would be a poster concerning the aesthetics of animal husbandry. Presumably nobody was arguing this.)