Officially, his campaign team does not want to certify the information, explaining that the arbitration will be made public during the presentation of his program, scheduled for the end of next week. But unofficially, the entourage of the president-candidate confirms this to the World : Emmanuel Macron has decided to increase the legal retirement age to 65, if he is re-elected in April, as written The echoesWednesday, March 9.
“We must resume the pension reform”Mr Macron said on Monday, in front of several elected officials who had given him their sponsorship, gathered at his campaign headquarters, outlining the outlines of the future reform, which he plans to implement. “We need to work harder”he said, while incorporating two early departure schemes under “long careers” and of “difficulty”. A precision, analyzed by a participant as “a gesture towards the CFDT”. Wednesday evening, before the parliamentarians of the majority, Mr. Macron undertook to present “an ambitious pension reform for a social model that holds”according to one participant.
“Pact between generations”
That day, Mr. Macron also presented the future pension reform that he intends to introduce as a pillar of a “pact between generations”which would also include measures supporting the individual throughout his life, from early childhood to apprenticeship, through vocational training, or dependency for the elderly.
During his declaration of candidacy, on March 3, in his letter to the French, the tenant of the Elysée had already written: “We will have to work more and continue to lower taxes on labor and production. » A way of demonstrating his determination to relaunch a project that he had to suspend and then abandon, in March 2020, due to the crisis linked to the coronavirus.
Mr. Macron has not ceased, in recent months, to recall the imperative to work more, in order to prepare the minds for a postponement of the legal age, without however specifying a precise age. “It is now clear, all objective reports show, unlike when I was elected, there is a funding problem. And so it is clear that we will have to work longer”he assured on December 15, on TF1.
“Because we are living longer, we will have to work longer and retire later,” had he already declared on July 12, 2021, advocating “the abolition of special regimes for new entrants”. Judging the French pension system “unfair”Emmanuel Macron believed that with “Forty-two different regimes, it maintains major inequalities and it will be necessary to move towards greater simplicity for greater justice”.
“Unfair and cynical”
The legal retirement age is now 62. That Emmanuel Macron plans to postpone it by three years has turned his competitors on in the race for the Elysée. For Marine Le Pen, “Emmanuel Macron wants to make the French pay for his incompetence. With him, it is always up to the people to sacrifice themselves”. And the candidate of the National Rally to recall her project: “Being able to retire at 60 when you have forty annual installments and started working between 17 and 20 years old”.
“Retirement at 65, we proposed it, Macron did not! How to trust candidate Macron when he promises everything President Macron did not do during his five-year term? », blasted Valérie Pécresse on Twitter.
Boris Vallaud, project manager and spokesman for the Socialist Party, for his part criticized a “unfair and cynical measure”in a tweet shared by Anne Hidalgo, the party’s candidate for the Elysée: “After whatever it costs, it will still cost the most modest”he lamented.
For Philippe Poutou, the candidate of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, “we understand better than he [Emmanuel Macron] do not want to debate, and not be accountable for all his antisocial attacks of yesterday and tomorrow. The only answer: to impose the sharing of wealth, retirement at 60, a reduction in working time”.
Solicited by The worldLaurent Berger, Secretary General of the CFDT, considers that the measure envisaged by the President of the Republic “is unfair and brutal”, in particular because it will penalize those who started their professional life before the age of 20 or around their twenties. He recalls that at present, there are already many workers who are unable to stay in their jobs until the age of 62, the age required – in common law – to be able to claim payment of their pension. . “Half of people are no longer employed when they retire”, he adds. The option put forward by the Head of State “is a very bad idea which we will oppose, even if compensation gestures are made for people who have completed long careers or occupied difficult jobs”.
