I grew up in Switzerland and left the country about 10 years ago. There's a lot to admire about the Swiss political system. However, I feel there are also substantial flaws with it that the author fails to address. Not everything in Swiss politics is rosy.
One of the biggest issues, I find, is that there is no constitutional oversight e.g. in form of a court. This not only leads to things like minarets being explicitly forbidden by the constitution (!) even though at the time of that initiative there were... 3 minarets in all of Switzerland. It also leads to a lot of issues when the government has to deal with contradictory requirements. The mass immigration initiative by the SVP was a great example: implementing it literally would have meant cancelling a lot of international contracts, which nobody really wanted. In the end, I think they reached some weird compromise solution (I had long left the country by then), but nobody can argue that that's the way the law was "intended" (and indeed, IIRC, the SVP tried to land another initiative that would have required the government to implement the first initiative literally... I'm not even sure what kind of legal sense that is supposed to make; thankfully, that initiative was rejected).
In that sense, it's not true that the constitution is "unambiguous". The government still has to draft specific laws according to new articles in the constitution and there's still much leeway there.
I also disagree that Switzerland is not polarised. It's true that the system itself, with a government involving all the major parties, acts as a stability mechanism, but the SVP has been trying to break that stability for years and years now, mounting attack after attack at the established consensus by using the kind of right-wing populism that has now become popular in other parts of the world as well. One particularly pernicious instance was when they were trying to hold the political system hostage in 2007, because the parliament didn't re-elect one of the SVP government members (Christoph Blocher). Blocher was thought to be intolerable by many, so they elected another SVP member, Evelyn Widmer-Schlumpf, instead. However, the SVP simply proclaimed that they wouldn't accept this and that if Schlumpf were to accept the vote, she would be expelled from her own party. It turned out that it was impossible for the SVP to just expel Schlumpf, though, so they had to expel the whole cantonal section that she belonged to, which I just find insane. Schlumpf went on to be a quite respected government member, but the SVP wouldn't stop whining for years about how the government wasn't representing the political parties anymore, even though they had created that situation completely on their own. In the end, Schlumpf abdicated after some years and they elected another SVP member that was slightly more tolerable.
Finally, we also have to look at voting participation, which is very low in Switzerland. I believe this comes partially from the fact that it's just too exhausting to have to keep up with dozens of referenda and initiatives each year, especially when they overwhelmingly get rejected. I do think that the numbers of signatures needed to start an initiative or referendum should be increased; I think it's currently at 100k which in this day and age means that everyone and their dog can make the people vote about something totally insane.
There's going to be a long section about the Blocher case in part III. However, honest question: Do you see SVP succeeding in polarizing the society? How exactly? Have the friends voting for SVP started treating you as an enemy? Do you fear expressing your opinion at particular places? Etc.
Judging from the kinds of examples you give (fear of expressing one's own opinion etc.), I'm thinking that you might be talking about a level of polarisation that I mostly associate with the US currently. That's certainly not what is going on in Switzerland, but it's also not what is going on in many other parts of the world, so I don't think "not as bad as the US" is a sufficient criterion for "not polarised".
All of these examples (and many, many more, going back over decades) attempt to paint the political opposition as subhuman and as selling out the country to "bad people", and don't forget: this is the most powerful party in Switzerland (though, to be fair, in Switzerland with its multi-party system that doesn't mean more than 25-30%).
There are also numerous examples of the SVP using the same sort of language and imagery when referring to immigrants, muslims, etc., but while equally repulsive, I'll grant you that it's not an example of polarisation necessarily.
By contrast, I now live in Germany, and before the rise of the far-right AfD party just a couple of years ago, this sort of rhetoric and imagery would have been completely unimaginable. Even now, the AfD is politically isolated and its politics, language and imagery are reviled pretty much across the political spectrum, whereas in Switzerland, the SVP has succeeded in "normalising" this sort of political discourse over decades.
Evelyn Widmer-Schlumpf's given name is "Evelyn" and her (adopted?) family name is "Widmer-Schlumpf", so the correct way to refer to her just by her family name would be "Widmer-Schlumpf". [I am Swiss BTW.]
Please keep in mind that many countries / cultures, even Western ones, have a naming tradition different from "first given name / second given name / single family name".
I was typing on my mobile phone and was getting tired of typing out the full name, but you are correct (incidentally, it wouldn't be different in Germany).
One of the biggest issues, I find, is that there is no constitutional oversight e.g. in form of a court. This not only leads to things like minarets being explicitly forbidden by the constitution (!) even though at the time of that initiative there were... 3 minarets in all of Switzerland. It also leads to a lot of issues when the government has to deal with contradictory requirements. The mass immigration initiative by the SVP was a great example: implementing it literally would have meant cancelling a lot of international contracts, which nobody really wanted. In the end, I think they reached some weird compromise solution (I had long left the country by then), but nobody can argue that that's the way the law was "intended" (and indeed, IIRC, the SVP tried to land another initiative that would have required the government to implement the first initiative literally... I'm not even sure what kind of legal sense that is supposed to make; thankfully, that initiative was rejected).
In that sense, it's not true that the constitution is "unambiguous". The government still has to draft specific laws according to new articles in the constitution and there's still much leeway there.
I also disagree that Switzerland is not polarised. It's true that the system itself, with a government involving all the major parties, acts as a stability mechanism, but the SVP has been trying to break that stability for years and years now, mounting attack after attack at the established consensus by using the kind of right-wing populism that has now become popular in other parts of the world as well. One particularly pernicious instance was when they were trying to hold the political system hostage in 2007, because the parliament didn't re-elect one of the SVP government members (Christoph Blocher). Blocher was thought to be intolerable by many, so they elected another SVP member, Evelyn Widmer-Schlumpf, instead. However, the SVP simply proclaimed that they wouldn't accept this and that if Schlumpf were to accept the vote, she would be expelled from her own party. It turned out that it was impossible for the SVP to just expel Schlumpf, though, so they had to expel the whole cantonal section that she belonged to, which I just find insane. Schlumpf went on to be a quite respected government member, but the SVP wouldn't stop whining for years about how the government wasn't representing the political parties anymore, even though they had created that situation completely on their own. In the end, Schlumpf abdicated after some years and they elected another SVP member that was slightly more tolerable.
Finally, we also have to look at voting participation, which is very low in Switzerland. I believe this comes partially from the fact that it's just too exhausting to have to keep up with dozens of referenda and initiatives each year, especially when they overwhelmingly get rejected. I do think that the numbers of signatures needed to start an initiative or referendum should be increased; I think it's currently at 100k which in this day and age means that everyone and their dog can make the people vote about something totally insane.