Time.news – For three decades, the aging of the population has been a source of concern for think tanks at the forefront of societal issues. In the United States, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank of neo-conservative inspiration, devoted international conferences and numerous publications as early as the 1990s to the phenomenon. The combination of non-generational renewal and longer life expectancy was above all perceived as a threat to state security, insofar as it implied a transfer of public and private expenditure traditionally allocated to the defense towards health spending, comparable to a sort of demographic state of siege.
This boomer generation, now dominant in an inverted age pyramid, constitutes the real electoral weight. This is an age group that entered working life during a period of full employment and easy credit, but endowed with a variable geometry empathy towards the rising generations.
According to a report by the United Nations Population Office, France comes in tenth position in absolute value of the over 65s (13.16 million), but sixth in proportional value, or 20.3% of the national census. Just after Japan, Italy, Greece and Portugal tied, and Germany. Still according to the multilateral organization, the degree of dependency of old age, OADR for its English acronym, “old age dependency ratio”, France is in seventh position worldwide. It is therefore a stratum which, far from being marginal, has a decisive impact on the results of the electoral consultations. This vote logically responds to the idea that seniors have of their socio-economic needs, but also to the programs that seem to them to offer a way of life most likely to guarantee them a quality longevity.
This age group is also the one who votes the most. Its expectations are still very little explored by the political world, insofar as everything related to the color gray is still perceived, despite its strategic dimension, as unsexy by research institutes. When the subject is approached, it is only through the dependency factor. Emmanuel Macron, whose gerontophilia is no longer to be demonstrated, by proposing to postpone retirement to 65, flattered the ego of this age category which does not see itself as dependent and intends to assert that it still has things to share as assets. If some reduce it to a state of vulnerability, the problem of the boomer generation is more and more often that of discrimination in access to employment, a concern paradoxically shared with the bottom of the age pyramid, with whom she most often comes into conflict in the labor market. A study in South Korea, one of the countries with the highest level of longevity in the world, shows that the vast majority of people over 70 would not stop working, whatever the sector of activity, if they offered him the possibility of continuing to remain in his post.
The Covid policies of recent years, driven by President Macron, respond to a form of age demagoguery. Living long involves keeping threats at bay. The apparent overprotection of the over 65s versus the guilt of youth. These measures have innovated by normalizing child abuse, with regard to its access to preventive medicine, its possibilities of socialization, the conditions of school life. The sacrifice of childhood was also the subject of a World Bank report of January 22, 2021: “Urgent measures to counter the impact of Covid-19 on education”. By Covid-19, we must understand the dystopian measures imposed in the world, by effect of imitation of what was practiced in France at the same time. By January 2021, these measures had made 150 million new poor children around the world.
Following the demographic curve, Macronism has reversed the fundamentals of the duty to protect from the most adult to the youngest. The senior electorate returned it well, voting in the first round at 39% for the incumbent president. Candidate Marine Le Pen barely managed to garner 17% of pensioner votes. During Wednesday’s presidential debate, she is also the only one to have put a name to the suffering of young people. A taboo subject for two years. In addition to the relegation and all-terrain impoverishment of an increasingly rare youth, its representatives will also have to carry on their shoulders the fiscal pressure of expenses linked to old age. If the OADR is 25% in 2019, it will be 50% in 2050.
However, young people do not mobilize to vote. It has a lot to defend, among other things to mobilize to invent new mechanisms of intergenerational solidarity. She seems given over to a certain fatalism. Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon during the first round, collected most of this junior vote.
While those over 70 have clearly expressed their intention to vote in favor of Emmanuel Macron, there remains a considerable fringe of seniors who do not recognize themselves in studies of the “Next Gen” type (Ikea), in which marvelous cities built for the use of elders alone are proposed. This non-anecdotal fringe is that of those who died anonymously during the Covid years, of those who were buried without funerals, without sacraments, without autopsies, without witnesses, without family support in the illness, who were exposed to the denial of care and abuse at nursing homes. It is also that of digital rupture and dereliction. Those of them who still can, may still be able to assert a sanction vote, or even a vote of empathy for the rising generations.