Pension reform: Elisabeth Borne, who will receive the unions, says she is “listening”

2023-05-14 08:33:27

Two days away from receiving the unions separately at Matignon, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne wants to believe him: “Even after these turbulent months, I remain convinced that more room must be given to negotiation and social dialogue”, says she in an interview published this Sunday in the JDD. “That’s why I didn’t want to send out a detailed agenda for these meetings: I’m listening to the priorities that the trade unions and employers’ organizations want to put in the discussion”.

A little further, she mentions “the importance of the stakes”, and to quote “the prevention of professional wear and tear, the employment of seniors, retraining, the universal time savings account…”, subjects where the government has left the door open, the better to close it on the extension of working hours.

“Moving forward is the only thing that matters to me”

True to her line, the Prime Minister said she “regrets” the remarks which “could suggest that this reform was not necessary”. Likewise, she says she is “struck” to meet employees “who started working early or have arduous jobs (and) still think that they will have to work until they are 64: this is not the case”, she recalls.

This is why she is very severe, in the interview, with the bill to repeal the postponement of the retirement age to 64, which will be examined in the National Assembly on June 8, at the initiative of the Liot deputies (Freedoms, independents, Overseas, territories), that the unions, them, hope to see succeed: “It is irresponsible to make believe that this bill could prosper! We are telling the French people that not only are we not concerned with bringing the pension system back into balance, but, worse, that we are worsening its imbalance! “, she protests. “It’s serious to lie to the French,” she adds.

The date is all the more symbolic as on Tuesday, it will be exactly a year since Elisabeth Borne was appointed head of government. And more than seven months that its action seems to revolve only around the controversial reform of the pension system. While, she defends, 27 texts have been signed by the National Assembly where the presidential camp is tested every day.

These three days of travel to Reunion, at the end of which the interview was carried out, “it is an opportunity to project oneself into the future and into the answers that we can give to the French”, confides she. She is said to be weakened, threatened, like all her predecessors at some point in their political action. But the former Minister of Labor does not want to leave Matignon. “For the past year, I have been working to provide concrete responses to meet the country’s considerable challenges that our country is facing. I want to continue to meet these challenges, and I will put all my energy and determination into it,” she said in this interview. “I have no doubt that some would see themselves in my place” but “moving forward is the only thing that matters to me,” she adds.

Asked about the biography of journalist Bérengère Bonte, of which Borne is trying to have passages erased in future reprints, the Prime Minister gets carried away: “When a journalist describes in detail the conditions of my father’s suicide, when she has intrusive on my intimacy, on the relationship with my son, with my ex-husband, when she spreads allegations about my health or my sexual orientation, how can she claim that this could have been done with my consent? At some point, you want to say: enough is enough,” she says.