A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus. “We make posters, the other side goes to the judge,” is how Alexander Segert put it when we met here the other day. “I love it when they do that.”...
A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus. “We make posters, the other side goes to the judge,” is how Alexander Segert put it when we met here the other day. “I love it when they do that.”

He designed the poster in question. As manager of Goal, the public relations firm for the Swiss People’s Party, Mr. Segert has overseen various campaign posters. This one, for the referendum, used minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles (“mushrooms,” Mr. Segert demurred, implausibly). Beside the missiles a woman glowers from inside a niqab. “Stop” is written below in big, black letters.

The obvious message: Minarets lead to Sharia law. Never mind that there are only four minarets in Switzerland to begin with, and that Muslims, some 340,000 of them, or 4 percent of the population, mostly from the Balkans and Turkey, have never been notably zealous.

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