Berne - To the shock of Switzerland's political establishment, a right-wing populist party looks like emerging from tomorrow's general election as the country's biggest conservative force.
The rise of the Swiss People's Party - a phenomenon similar to that of Mr Jorg Haider's Freedom Party, which polled so strongly in neighbouring Austria earlier this month - is a challenge to the coalition arrangement that has run Switzerland for 40 years.
Since the last general election four years ago, the party has leap-frogged from fourth to second place in the opinion polls, behind the Social Democrats and ahead of the pro-business Radicals and the Christian Democrats. The most recent opinion survey showed the party getting 20 per cent of the vote, up by 5.1 per cent since the last election.
The party's message is a mixture of isolationism, anti-immigration rhetoric and low taxation. Its success threatens the unwritten "magic formula" by which the main parties have always divided ministerial seats among themselves in the federal council.