From Swiss Farmers to European Kings? ‘Folklore,’ ‘Common Sense,’ and Structural Crisis in Western Europe's Largest Ponzi Scheme

Abstract The article analyzes the European Kings Club (EKC), the largest Ponzi scheme in recent Western European history, which gained particular traction in the rural regions of Inner Switzerland during the early 1990s. When the scheme began collapsing and authorities intensified their prosecution, it triggered a militant political mobilization among the conservative rural population. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of “common sense” and “folklore,” we reconstruct the conditions that enabled this regressive movement. Based on a qualitative content analysis of an extensive historical corpus (1,568 newspaper articles, 25 television and radio reports, and 5 original EKC documents), we first examine the political practices of EKC members. In a second step, we analyze the Club’s folklore, which popularized a contradictory worldview by blending parts of the Swiss Liberation Tradition with contemporary sci-fi and Wall Street imagery. Finally, we trace fragments of a successfully engaged “common sense” in members’ statements, systematizing them under the ideologemes of familialism, productivism, and sovereignism. We argue that this everyday worldview was destabilized by the structural transformations of the 1990s, creating the conditions for an irrational mobilization, that nevertheless exhibits a rational core. Our findings contribute to the political sociology of regressive movements and to recent ethnographic debates on the pre-political common sense of actors and its role in political mobilization.