Lhe historic social movement which has mobilized millions of people in the streets for more than a month in France is watched with attention in our respective countries and everywhere within the European Union.
Emmanuel Macron has also used the authoritative argument of international comparison to justify the merits of his project, yet massively rejected by the French population. So there would be “no alternatives”only a natural evidence to make the citizens work until the exhaustion, beyond the life expectancy in good health.
And this, while the statistics show that a person who started working at 22 and without a career break already leaves at 64.5 years in France, against 63.9 years on average in the EU.
The measure taken by the President of the French Republic, like his liberal counterparts in the rest of the Union, is indicative of a clear political choice: to finance tax gifts for large companies and the richest on the back millions of workers, who will be deprived of the best two years of their retirement.
A catastrophic application in Europe
The postponement of the legal retirement age is not a technical adjustment, it is a political project aimed at maintaining the privileges of a handful of billionaires, to the detriment of all the rest of the population. Similar reforms have also been carried out in many of our European countries, always relying on the same refrain and provoking the same catastrophe everywhere.
Raising the retirement age absolutely does not “work more to contribute more”, but generates a massive increase in precariousness and social and gender inequalities. Many seniors thus find themselves, in reality, forced to leave before reaching the legal age due to their physical and psychological incapacity or their exclusion from the labor market. They then have only incomplete pensions or have only the social minima to meet their needs during their retirement.
In Germany, while the legal retirement age will eventually be pushed back to 67, one in five pensioners now lives in poverty. In Denmark, the retirement age (which will increase from 67 today to 69 by 2035) will soon be eleven years beyond the life expectancy in good health (58 years).
In the Netherlands, the poverty rate among retirees has almost tripled in less than ten years, while the legal retirement age has been pushed back by two years. In Sweden, where the initiator of the reform has called on France not to imitate him, 92% of women have thus experienced a reduction in their pension and the poverty rate for retired women is twice as high as that of men. .
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