Paris Emmanuel Macron has just announced that he will increase pensions by four percent in July if he is re-elected to the Élysée Palace. Normally, the pensions are only adjusted in January.
On the one hand, the early change can be explained by the current price increases. But that’s not the only reason. Pensions are a sensitive issue for the president’s election campaign, who is running for the second time in the runoff against right-wing extremist Marine Le Pen on April 24. The daily Le Figaro wrote: “Pension reform – the issue that has poisoned Macron for the past five years.”
Shortly before the first ballot, Macron announced that he wanted to raise the retirement age to 65 by 2031. From 2023, the retirement age is to be raised by four months per year for those born after 1961.
There are not many other ways of financing the social system – either more taxes or fewer pensions, said Macron. His plan caused a lot of outrage and brought him criticism, especially from the left, who spoke of social injustice.
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Most right-wing candidates for the presidency wanted to raise the retirement age. However, Le Pen continues to bet on the current age of 62, even enticing early-starters to retire at 60. The politician described Macron’s proposal as “inhumane” for some professions, but she highlighted her project as “social justice”.
In the face of the criticism, Macron has since backtracked a bit. A retirement age of 64 is also conceivable: “65 years is not dogma.” If there were too many tensions and an agreement could be reached, adjustments would be possible.
65 years is not a dogma. Emmanuel Macron
For Macron, the pension was the big project of his first term. He planned a fundamental reform of the entire pension system, in which the different pension funds should be aligned and a points system should be introduced. The official retirement age should remain at 62, but the full payment retirement age would then be around 64.
The planned reform led to months of strikes and protests between December 2019 and February 2020. Then the corona pandemic came and the project was postponed – but not cancelled. For Macron, the plan is a priority, as is unemployment insurance reform, which he has already implemented.
Now the president is going back into the election campaign with his plan. His pension plan was an advantage in the first ballot, says François Miquet-Marty, director of the opinion research institute Viavoice. “He allowed right-wing voters to be conquered.” But it is an issue that can create tension and worry many voters.
Macron switches to left-wing voters
The reform could become a stumbling block for the runoff. Between the two rounds of voting, Macron must try to capture votes from left-wing voters. The calls from the Conservatives, Greens and Socialists to vote for Macron are not enough because they did too badly in the election.
The liberal Macron must therefore focus on the voters of left-wing politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was 21.95 percent behind Le Pen (23.15 percent) and Macron (27.84 percent) in the first ballot. Some left-wing voters could defect to Le Pen, while others might not vote at all.
There is anti-Macron sentiment, especially among Mélenchon supporters. He was criticized as the “president of the rich” and had made himself unpopular with tax cuts for companies, among other things.
Macron now has to make concessions on social issues. He has already suggested raising the minimum pension from 980 euros to 1100 euros.
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Whether that is enough is questionable. In his program, Mélenchon had called for retirement at the age of 60, i.e. even a lowering of the retirement age. The left called for “not to give a single vote to Le Pen” – which is not a call to vote for Macron, but can also mean abstention. Mélenchon had disparagingly described Macron as a “liberal” at election events and condemned his program as a “fake fairy tale”.
Numerous experts stressed that in France there is no urgent need to reform the pension in order to save the system. One of them is Michael Zemmour, lecturer in economics at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris and specialist in social issues. “The gains from a possible reform will primarily serve to reduce overall government spending,” he says.
Raising the retirement age by one year would lead to savings of eight to ten billion euros, with 25 to 30 percent of this having to be accounted for in other social spending, such as unemployment benefits.
France’s pension system is very expensive, accounting for 13.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), compared to an average of 8 percent for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
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