GENEVA: First projections indicate that a plan to limit immigration to Switzerland was approved by a razor-thin majority on Sunday.

But authorities said the final result was still too close to call and might be subject to recounts.

Swiss public radio SRF 4 reported that 50.4 per cent of voters appeared to have backed a proposal by the nationalist People’s Party to introduce quotas for all types of immigrants.

Some 49.6 per cent voted against the plan, but a 0.6-percentage point margin of error meant the outcome could still go either way, said Claude Longchamp of polling organisation gfs.bern.

If the measure is approved then the Swiss government — which along with most political parties opposed the plan — will need to renegotiate painstakingly forged treaties with the European Union on the free movement of workers.

Business groups warned that many of the 80,000 people who moved to Switzerland last year were vital for the country’s economy.

At the moment most of the EU’s 500 million citizens can live and work in Switzerland with little formality, while Swiss citizens can do the same in the 28-nation bloc that encircles the Alpine nation.

Two years ago Switzerland introduced quotas for immigrants from eight central and eastern European nations, a move that was already heavily criticized by the EU.

The new proposal would force the government to draft a law extending quotas to immigrants from Western Europe and introduce limits on all foreigners’ rights to bring in family members or access Swiss social services.

Almost a quarter of the eight million people living in Switzerland are foreigners. This is partly due to Switzerland’s healthy economy and high salaries.

But Switzerland’s restrictive citizenship laws also mean many people who were born in the country or have lived there for a long time don’t have a Swiss passport, inflating the share of foreigners compared to other countries.

The People’s Party, which has more than a quarter of seats in the lower house of Parliament, launched a massive campaign in favour of limiting immigration, hoping to emulate the success of other referendums in recent years that targeted foreigners.

Some posters showed a huge tree crushing a map of Switzerland, while others depicted a heavily veiled woman beneath the headline “1 million Muslims soon?’’

According to official figures about 500,000 people in the nation of eight million identified themselves as Muslim.

Many of them are former refugees who fled to Switzerland during the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Only a minority are actively religious.—AP