Reform of the second pillar – the Council of States, an overstretched body? – News


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You can twist and turn it as you like: the Council of States delivered a strange political spectacle on Wednesday morning. One can also ask whether the small chamber is overwhelmed with the reform of the second pillar.

There is a general consensus that the conversion rate of 6.8 percent is too high and needs to be lowered. Because that would lead to lower pensions, compensatory measures are being discussed. A crucial question is how high these will be.

Last December, the National Council decided in favor of deep compensation measures. Some doubt that these would have a chance in front of the people.

Cold feet due to high additional costs

An FDP-SP majority therefore agreed on a new, significantly more generous proposal in the preparatory social commission of the Council of States. However, the responsible Federal Social Insurance Office only calculated how expensive this would be afterwards. With the additional costs of 25 billion, some citizens may have been shocked – or, as Paul Rechsteiner put it, got cold feet.

It was, of all people, the FDP member of the Council of States, Joseph Dittli, the father of the commission’s proposal, who worked out another proposal in the last few days and also put this on the Council of States’ table on Wednesday. But that is not the norm.

SVP Councilor of States Hannes Germann commented that he had never seen new proposals being made on such a complex topic on the day of the debate. In fact, one wonders how serious that is. The majority of the Council of States decided to reject the proposal to the Commission.

Obviously fundamental questions have to be discussed again in advance in the Commission. So it seems almost comical that the President of the pre-advisory commission, Central Councilor Erich Ettlin, proudly stated at the beginning of the debate that the commission had dealt with 34 reports and that he did not know which questions were still open. That was obviously a colossal miscalculation.

And it is quite possible that some had political ulterior motives when they were referred back to the Commission.

Persuasion work needed for women’s retirement age

In autumn of this year we will vote on the AHV reform. Central topic: raising the retirement age for women. But there is still some convincing to be done, because many women are still worse off than men in old age. It would have been important for the citizens if they could have referred to the BVG revision discussed in this session, which would improve the situation of women in the second pillar and thus their situation as a whole in old age.

That will now hardly be possible. In this respect, the decision of the Council of States to send the BVG proposal back to the Commission again plays into the hands of the council left; in the referendum on the AHV reform and the increase in the retirement age for women.

Politics is sometimes a complex game. The Council of States also had to find out. And the big question remains how to proceed with the reform of the second pillar.

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