Zürich on a Sunday morning can feel like the day after Armageddon: so empty, so calm, despite being Switzerland’s biggest city. But then the church bells erupt across the lake basin, and a jogger trots by like a polite deer in aerodynamic sunglasses, and one knows that all is fine in this proudly impeccable place, where little is left to chance and the authorities even track the city’s pigeons with GPS.

Swiss people know they are lucky. A highly diversified economy keeps salaries high and income inequality comparatively low. A British friend once remarked that our supermarkets feel like the gourmet hall at Harrods. The state makes business easy. Hiking paths are maintained by armies of volunteers. The flip side is our reputation for being a nation of humourless control freaks, but there are benefits to trains running on time. In a restless world, Switzerland remains a place where one can exhale.

The problem with luck, of course, is that one becomes afraid of losing it. But fortune has a tendency to make conservatives of us all, of course. Yet how to preserve what one cherishes?

The answer offered by the far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) is to freeze the country. On 14 June, Swiss voters will decide whether the permanent population should be capped at 10 million. That threshold could be reached sometime between 2033 and 2041. Polls suggest the vote will be on a knife edge.

Switzerland’s population has indeed grown rapidly. In the last 25 years, it jumped from 7.2 to 9.1 million, with roughly four-fifths of that increase driven by immigration. The SVP, the country’s largest political........

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