BERN. Gerhard Pfister has accused the Free Democrats of telling voters a story the 13th AHV pension cannot survive. In an interview with the NZZ published on Monday, the former president of the Centre party said that suggesting the new pension can be financed without extra revenue “borders on deliberate deception”. On 29 November, Switzerland votes on whether to lift the standard VAT rate from 8.1 per cent to 8.5 per cent and assign the extra yield to the old-age insurance.
The Centre campaigned against introducing the 13th pension. It is now campaigning for the tax that would pay part of it. Pfister’s case is that the voters’ yes, in March 2024, created a bill, and that refusing every way of meeting the bill is not a financing plan. The VAT rise is put at about CHF 1.5 billion a year. The 13th payment itself costs on the order of CHF 4 billion, so the tax covers less than half. Further measures are expected from 2030 even if this vote passes. The first 13th pension is paid in December anyway, to about 2.6 million people. The vote does not decide whether the money goes out. It decides whether this tax comes in.
What Pfister says the FDP is refusing
The Free Democrats, he said, reject both a higher VAT rate and higher wage contributions. The only rise they want is in the retirement age, a proposal voters threw out by more than 70 per cent a few years ago. Asked about Susanne Vincenz-Stauffacher, the party’s co-president, he said the alternatives dissolve into vagueness: the wish to save, somewhere else, whatever a new expense requires. He pointed to the relief package that, after a hard argument, cut federal spending by CHF 2 billion, and treated it as proof that a savings round of that kind cannot be presented as the way to fund the social insurance system.
He was harsher about where the party’s austerity lands. The FDP, he said, is “on a dangerous path and focuses only on spending for the weakest”. Set against that, he cited the government’s own figure of about CHF 1 billion in follow-on costs for the Bilaterals III package with the European Union, and said he hears no equivalent Free Democrat outrage about where that billion is supposed to come from. Last week’s announcement of higher wage contributions, because the disability insurance is short of money, was put to him as another bite at purchasing power. His answer was that the fury is reserved for the social budget.
A yes and a no are both allowed
Pfister refused the idea that a no on 29 November would be the voters correcting themselves. He quoted former federal councillor Hans Hürlimann: in direct democracy, the only actor entitled to be contradictory is the people. Voters may adopt an initiative and then reject the financing that follows. Calling that a change of heart, he said, would be frivolous. He also argued that the country should not talk itself out of hearing what households are saying about security. The feeling that purchasing power is slipping in an expensive, successful country is not, in his view, an illusion. A higher VAT rate does touch that purchasing power. The 13th pension, he said, is worth many times more to the people who receive it.
The NZZ put it to him that the polls have the yes camp on the defensive. He did not answer with a number. He answered with a theory of compromise: majorities are available only when parties drop their maximum demand. The FDP’s maximum, as he describes it, is no new revenue at all. The SVP has called the VAT rise a raid on the wallet. The Free Democrats have called VAT an antisocial tax, because everyone pays it, including people the 13th pension will never reach. Both lines will be on the leaflets. Neither line finds the other half of the CHF 4 billion.
What the ballot actually settles
A yes on 29 November raises a tax and earmarks the money. It does not finish the AHV’s arithmetic, and the government has already said the years after 2030 need a further repair. A no leaves the December payment in place and the funding argument exactly where Pfister says the FDP wants it: on cuts and on a retirement age the country has declined to raise. Households are already telling surveyors they feel poorer than they did a year ago. The campaign will try to borrow that mood. The vote is still about a pension Switzerland has promised, and about the half of the bill this particular tax would cover.