France found itself paralyzed and buried in rubbish after the president Emmanuel Macron decreed his controversial reform of the country’s retirement system, a plan opposed by two-thirds of French people. But the thousands of protesters who gathered in the Parisian Place de la Concorde are just a small reflection of a global debate that is echoed in the United States, Japan and elsewhere, which face the challenge of providing a dignified retirement to a number growing number of citizens without depleting resources.
Le Monde wrote in an editorial: “Emmanuel Macron kept his campaign promise. But she did it with her back against the wall, with the pressure of the protest movement against her”. So far, reforms of retirement programs through parliamentary channels have proven impossible, and not just in France: loud bipartisan applause came at President Joe Biden’s recent State of the Union address when he vowed to protect Social Security and Medicare. , despite the obvious need to reassess a path that will surely detonate the federal budget in a decade.
Faced with this scenario, Macron insists that he is right, and that the data supports him: the UN has projected that by 2050, the number of people aged 65 and over will double in the world, going from 700 to 1500 million. And France is no exception: its population increases by three people over the age of 65 every five minutes, according to the National Institute for Demographic Studies. At the same time, the country’s average life expectancy has increased in recent years to 85 years for women and 79 years for men in 2020, some of the highest figures in the world.
France already allocates almost 15 percent of its gross domestic product to pensions. And Macron’s adjustment will be small compared to most of his European neighbors, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. This would keep France in line with, for example, Germany, where the retirement age is 65 (there, too, lawmakers are debating whether it will be necessary to raise it to 67).
Firmness
The two-year change in the retirement age had been one of the axes of President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign. The Gallic Senate had already given him medium sanction to the project with 62% of the votesbut convinced that he would suffer a setback in the deputies, where the weight of the left is notable, the president advanced anyway.
Macron had tried to make changes to the pension system before and failed: in 2019, during his first term, he put forward a different plan to unify the complex French pension system, arguing that get rid of the 42 special regimes for sectors ranging from railway and energy workers to lawyers, it was crucial to maintaining the financial viability of the system. Protests against those proposals lasted longer than any strike since the 1968 worker walkouts (the famous French May), and Macron’s changes were finally shelved at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
The discussion arose again, however, during the last presidential campaign. The president rekindled the commitment to reform. The conservative-dominated Senate approved the changes to the pension system by a vote of 193 to 114. But the main challenge for the government of Macron he was in the lower house, the National Assembly. When Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne failed to find a viable majority in parliament, Macron decided to rush the weight of a vote against it and invoked article 49.3 of the constitution to push legislation without a vote.
risks
Analysts note that this exposes the president and his minister to a vote of no confidence in which the government could lose. And if that happens, whoever takes over will surely nullify the Decree that brought Macron to ruin. The unions, which have been surprisingly united despite their vaunted political differences, say the reform will penalize low-income blue-collar workers who tend to start their careers early, forcing them to work longer than less-seen graduates. affected by the changes.
Opinion polls show that 66% of the French oppose changes in pensions and they support the protest movement, which peaked last fortnight when some 1.28 million people took to the streets. Transport workers, energy workers, stevedores, teachers and public sector workers, including museum staff, have gone on strike: the strike by garbage collectors has led to the accumulation of more than 7,000 tons of waste in half of paris
And it is that for the French, the pension system is the cornerstone of the social protection model from the country. A model that politicians call “solidarity between generations”, and where the active population finances all retirees (like the Argentine system), who receive a state pension. A benefit that they refuse to reassess and whose viability will soon be financially tested.
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