Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne presents a new pension reform on Tuesday, a highly sensitive project which provides for a shift in the legal retirement age in order to restore the regime’s finances in the long term, despite unfavorable opinion polls and a front united trade union.
Elisabeth Borne should announce a postponement of the legal age from 62 to 64, at the rate of three additional months per year, according to several media citing concordant sources.
President Emmanuel Macron would have, according to these sources, decided to dismiss the track of a shift in the legal age to 65, as he had promised during the presidential campaign.
To this postponement of age would be added an acceleration of the implementation of the law of 2014 which provides for the extension of the contribution period from 42 to 43 years to obtain a full pension.
For the executive, this reform must make it possible to preserve the system in the long term, while its deficit could reach 13.5 billion euros in 2030, then 43.9 billion in 2050, according to the Ministry of Labor.
Postponing the legal age by two years and extending the contribution period would generate 17.7 billion euros in additional revenue, which would bring the balance of the scheme into the green, to just under 5 billion. approximately euros in 2030, according to estimates by the Ministry of Labour.
This would allow the government to free up room for maneuver to finance measures on compensation for wear and tear, the employment of seniors or to increase small pensions.
The reform will be presented to the Council of Ministers on January 23, before a review in the Assembly in early February.
Concessions
Deprived of an absolute majority at the Palais-Bourbon, the presidential camp worked to convince the conservatives, and in particular Les Républicains (LR), of the merits of its project.
The latter, who have around sixty deputies in the lower house and control the senatorial majority, must meet in a seminar on Tuesday to decide on the course of action to be taken on the vote on the project.
The president of the party, Eric Ciotti, who met Elisabeth Borne last Thursday, has already made known his conditions.
In Le Journal du Dimanche, he says he wants the reform to be spread over two five-year terms with a legal age raised to 64 in 2032, an intermediate stage at 63 in 2027 and a review clause at this deadline.
He also wants a significant increase in pensions for all retirees, a measure that could prove very costly. The executive has so far promised to guarantee a minimum pension of 1,200 euros, or 85% of the minimum wage, to future retirees claiming a full career.
The president of the Renaissance group in the National Assembly, Aurore Bergé, told France Inter on Monday that the presidential majority was in favor of extending this measure, which would bring its total cost to 2.7 billion euros.
The Prime Minister also met on Monday with the leaders of the centrist group Libertés, Indépendants, Outre-mer et Territoires (LIOT), which has twenty deputies.
The reaction of employees, and their degree of mobilization against this reform, which was largely rejected according to opinion polls, remains the great unknown for the coming weeks.
The unions are for the moment united in their opposition to this project considered too brutal. They believe that the finances of the regime, according to them controlled, do not justify a reform of such magnitude. They agreed to meet on Tuesday evening to announce possible unit movements.
The left and far-right parties, also firmly opposed to the project, have promised to fuel the protest. La France insoumise has already called for a large demonstration on January 21, alongside youth organizations.
The 1995 Specter
The latest pension reform to date, in 2010 under Nicolas Sarkozy, which pushed back the legal retirement age from 60 to 62, led to a massive mobilization in the street. The reform had nevertheless been adopted as it stood.
This tour de force could be difficult to reproduce today, according to the former social adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy and president of Alixio, Raymond Soubie.
“There is a whole series of irritants that there weren’t in 2010: rising prices, Christmas strikes. For small bosses, it’s energy prices,” he told Reuters.
“We are still on shifting, sensitive and potentially explosive ground. It is not so much the pension reform that can be attacked, it can be a detonator for the rest. That’s why the government is cautious,” he added.
“It is not the strikes of 2019 that are being prepared, it is those of 1995”, estimates for his part an architect of the reform of the universal points system, the first project carried out by Emmanuel Macron, but left aside in 2020 in the face of social protest and the health crisis.
The massive strikes of 1995 against the plan to reform the special regimes had paralyzed the country for three weeks, forcing the government of Alain Juppé to back down.
This former member of the government is nevertheless betting on the adoption of the project, especially if the executive has recourse to a flexible legislative vehicle such as a bill for the amending financing of Social Security, a track favored by the government.
This type of text makes it possible to limit the debates in time since the Parliament must decide within 50 days. And if the discussions with the Republicans stumbled, the government could resort to article 49.3 of the Constitution to dispense with a vote as many times as it wished.
This article is originally published on boursorama.com
