PRight at the beginning of the year, French President Emmanuel Macron tackles one of the most difficult reform projects. If he has his way, a reform of the old-age security systems in France should take effect “from the summer of 2023”. The plan is to gradually raise the retirement age from the current 62 to a presumed 65 years, but details are not yet known. “We have to work more,” said Macron in his New Year’s speech. The aim is to permanently secure the financing of pensions “which would otherwise be threatened because we finance them with loans,” said the head of state.
Trade unions and the left-wing opposition are up in arms against the reform project even before it is officially presented in the Council of Ministers on January 10. “January will be hot,” threatened left-wing spokesman Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Indomitable France (LFI) party. A first protest march is to be organized on January 21st.
“Macron is lying,” LFI MP Clémentine Autain said on France Inter radio on Monday. It is not true that the financing of pensions is not secured. New Green party leader Marine Tondelier said on radio station RFI: “We are totally mobilized to get the government to back down on pension reform.” Communist party leader Fabien Roussel lamented that Macron would divide the country with the reform. “We will not allow any reform that forces us to work longer hours from 2023,” the communist said. The leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), Marine Le Pen, has also expressed opposition to the proposed reform. Although she no longer calls for a return to retirement at 60, she wants to avert an increase in the retirement age.
Macron’s political legacy
Even the most important trade unions cannot gain anything from the project. The leader of the moderate CFDT, Laurent Berger, has repeatedly expressed his opposition to raising the retirement age. “Such a brutal measure, which primarily affects employees with the lowest incomes, is by no means necessary,” says the CFDT. Berger asked if the government “has any desire to set the country on fire and carry out this deeply unjust reform, especially for ordinary workers”? Berger has a meeting this Tuesday with Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, who is also receiving other union and employer representatives for final consultations. The head of government was already unable to work out a compromise with the social partners during the previous consultations.
Recent polls show how unpopular the reform initiative is in the country. According to an opinion poll for ViaVoice, 55 percent of respondents refuse to work longer hours; 35 percent agree. The survey institute Odoxa determined that 67 percent of those surveyed considered raising the retirement age to 65 to be a “bad reform”. In France, pensioners are still mostly doing well, they can largely maintain the standard of living that they had in active professional life. In the newspaper “Les Echos”, the pollster Bernard Sananès warned of the social explosive nature of the pension reform. There is a risk of a social conflagration: “It only takes a spark,” said Sananès. The pandemic, but also the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis and inflation have fundamentally changed the attitude of many French people to work. “It’s less popular to work more and longer,” says the pollster.
For Macron, on the other hand, it is about his political legacy as a reform president. He endured strikes lasting weeks around the turn of the year 2019/20 for the restructuring of the old-age security systems. But the pandemic meant he eventually withdrew the reform. The new one shouldn’t have much in common with the old reform project, which envisaged the introduction of a complicated points system.
“Not for every price”
In the 20-minute New Year’s wish, the longest in the Fifth Republic, Macron emphasized that he was concerned with the long-term sustainability of pensions. The President relies on calculations by the pension supervisory body “Conseil d’orientation des retraites” (COR), which was set up in 2000, according to which there is a risk of deficits from now on. The committee has not made any specifications as to how the financing should be secured in the long term. The unions question the government’s calculations.
Macron also has the EU in mind in his reform ambitions. Due to its high debt ratio, France has an obligation to prove its budgetary seriousness. The most important hurdle has to be cleared by Prime Minister Borne’s minority government in the National Assembly. Borne obviously hopes for support from the Republicans (LR), who have always advocated pension reform in the past. Presidential candidate Francois Fillon wanted to introduce retirement at 65 in 2017. The new LR party leader Eric Ciotti no longer believes in it. After a conversation with Borne shortly before Christmas, Ciotti rejected the pension at 65 “too brutally”. France needs a pension reform, “but not at any price,” said Ciotti. LR parliamentary group leader Olivier Marleix has even threatened a vote of no confidence if Macron sticks to his retirement age of 65.
