Jérôme Meizoz, a political researcher at the University of Lausanne, elaborated. “Culture is not the major part of the People’s Party platform. But it’s been useful in spreading the view that the left controls the arts and the universities, so that there needs to be a counter model, more American, with private foundations, not public subsidies, except, of course, for exhibitions featuring nationalistic painters like the ones Blocher collects and concerts of yodeling or Glockenspiel.”

Stress laughed at that remark, when it was later recounted. “Blocher’s Switzerland is people in the mountains making cheese,” he said. “But you also have a Switzerland where people struggle to make ends meet. His party doesn’t represent the Switzerland where I grew up, which is made up of people who came to build the country, literally to build its buildings and streets. The Swiss People’s Party campaigns by using Osama bin Laden in posters about the threat of immigration. For me this is just unfair.”

Image Christoph Blocher with The Woodcutter by the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler, at his office in Bern, Switzerland, in 2006. Credit... Fred Merz/Rezo

He added: “Swiss people are not used to speaking their minds. The left wing parties haven’t wanted to lower themselves by reacting to Blocher’s tactics. So I just felt there had to be some reaction.”

Yuval and Shantala Dishon, a husband-and-wife duo, run a street theater company called Zanco in Geneva. Zanco staged its own protest, after a different referendum making it especially tough to gain asylum here passed with 68 percent of the vote in 2006. The company put on a show that toured the city’s public schools and neighborhoods. It told the story of a village that closed its doors to a foreigner and ended up never even learning who he was.

“Being politically outspoken is not usual for the cultural community here, we’re a quiet country, but some things need to be said,” Mr. Dishon said. “For more than 400 years, this city has been at least 30 percent foreigners. We live on a street called Swiss Village. Back in 1896 there was a fair here and bits of Swiss architecture from different cantons were combined to make houses on our street that supposedly represented Swiss culture. It’s the same thing Blocher’s party is doing by saying that Swiss flag tossing and the Alpenhorn represent the real Switzerland.”