PWhy does reforming social systems pose so many problems in France when Sweden and several other countries have carried out similar reforms? In Sweden, the retirement age is flexible. The older you leave, the higher the pension. The financial basis of the system is the future income on the capital invested. Most citizens are also covered by a pension supplement linked to their former employment. Despite the protests expressed about the resulting inequalities for the lowest incomes, the system has never been challenged as such.
France and Sweden, however, have in common that the left/right divide has always been the main political dividing line there. But it was translated in a different way on the political level. In Sweden, social democracy, in the form of reformist socialism, has been the driving force behind the welfare state project and welfare reforms. When the Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Party was defeated in 1976 after forty-four years in power, and replaced by a center-right government, the latter did not fundamentally change the social system.
Surprisingly enough, parties of left and right, with the exception of the left of the left and the hard right, concluded an agreement in the 1990s on the financial basis of future pensions. The main left and right parties (social democrats and moderate conservatives) were able to sign such an agreement by putting aside their ideological differences. The agreement was based on several official reports by neutral experts on how individualization, globalization and improved health would affect the population and public finances in the future.
New politico-cultural challenge
The French left, on the other hand, has never managed to unite its forces, except on rare occasions. The Communist Party, follower of a revolutionary socialism, was from the 1940s the best organized ideological current of the left. This meant that the Gaullist, conservative and nationalist movement (with, however, certain leftist traits), was the driving force behind the modernization of the French post-colonial social system. It paved the way for the socially and economically liberal period of the 1970s and 1980s, with governments made up of forces from both right and left. But neither has succeeded in reaching agreements on long-term economic or financial solutions capable of preserving the social system in a period of global change.
You have 56.24% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.