In the elements of language hammered out by the executive, everything suggests that there is no alternative: for ” to save ” our pension system, “We must gradually work longer”. The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, affirmed this in an interview granted to the Parisian, on December 2, 2022, in line with a rhetoric developed for more than a year by Emmanuel Macron. The scenario favored today by the team in power is to postpone the age from which the pension can begin to be paid.
Will the cursor be pushed from 62 to 64 or up to 65, in accordance with a campaign commitment from the Head of State? This unknown should be lifted on Tuesday, January 10, when the government will unveil the outline of its project.
But the option, which will finally be chosen, already arouses – and will continue to arouse – controversy, all the unions and left-wing parties being hostile to it, as well as the extreme right and some right-wing individuals. The opponents of the reform essentially accuse Emmanuel Macron and Elisabeth Borne of darkening the picture to justify painful measures, which penalize the most modest and only involve the active, while there are other solutions.
In this debate undermined by a complex theme, several questions are raised. First of all, what is the situation? The latest report from the Pensions Orientation Council (COR), published in September 2022, shows that the outlook is not good, even if it is “do not validate the merits of the speeches that put forward the idea of an uncontrolled dynamic of pension expenditure”. The system returned to surpluses in 2021 (+900 million euros) and should remain in the green in 2022 (+3.2 billion euros). However, the balance between revenue and expenditure should become negative again from 2023 and over a more or less long period of time depending on the assumptions reviewed.
In the most favorable option, the deficit would be absorbed “circa mid-2030s”, according to the COR. But if we take as a convention the one that corresponds to current rules and practices, the return to the waterline would be more distant: in the mid-2050s. Above all, it would only occur in the most optimistic configuration, with a productivity of + 1.6% per year. If this growth rate were +0.7% (i.e. the average value observed over 2009-2019) or even +1%, the accounts would be constantly in the red.
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