Flop of the week: Opfikon local farce
Voters are expected to vote on the future of their *Stadt-Anzeiger*: The local SP has collected signatures to prevent the *Stadt-Anzeiger* from remaining the official gazette for another four years.
A member of the SP board told SDA that significantly more than the required 300 signatures had been collected. They are therefore confident that the referendum will go ahead once the signatures have been certified. The opposition was triggered by the sale of the paper to SVP vice-president and car importer Walter Frey, who already publishes five neighborhood papers in the Zurich region with his company Lokalinfo. The SP fears that the Stadt-Anzeiger will develop into an "SVP-Anzeiger" under the new owner. It would be naïve to believe that Walter Frey is only buying newspapers throughout the canton of Zurich for purely financial reasons, the SP writes in a press release. Should the referendum come to a vote and be accepted, there are two possible solutions for the SP: either the city looks for a new provider for the official publications. Or the newspaper would have to be sold on to an owner who is independent of party politics.
