Jakob Hauri, a retired janitor, didn’t mince his words: “Those retired government ministers with their twenty-grand-a-month pensions have lost touch with the reality normal working people live in.” One of about five hundred retirees gathered on the Federal Square in the Swiss capital Bern, Hauri was referring to a controversial letter penned by three former ministers, sent to thousands of households, calling on voters to reject a “dangerous” proposal by labor unions to raise pension payments in light of soaring living costs. It was a peak moment of what observers have already dubbed one of the most contentious votes in Swiss history.

Through a so-called popular initiative, Swiss citizens or political organizations can prompt a national vote on just about anything, if they get the signatures of at least a hundred thousand adult citizens. This March 3, Swiss voters went to the polls to decide on two separate but related such initiatives. One was launched by the youth wing of the center-right Liberal Party and proposed raising the country’s retirement age, first from sixty-five to sixty-six and then continuously and automatically raising it according to average life expectancy.

The other was the polar opposite: rather than raising the retirement age, an initiative by the Swiss Trade Union Federation demanded that pension payments themselves be raised. Specifically, it called for a “thirteenth monthly pension payment,” analogous to the extra monthly salary enshrined in most union contracts, which is often paid out at the end of every year.