DAt the beginning of November 2022, Emmanuel Macron received major groups such as Lafarge, ArcelorMittal or TotalEnergies at the Elysée and announced to them that he would be able to release 10 billion euros in additional public aid in order to decarbonize the fifty industrial sites with the highest CO emissions.2 of the Hexagon. At the same time, in addition to the reform of unemployment insurance aimed at making 4 billion euros in additional savings, he assured that a further postponement of the retirement age was essential to reduce public expenditure and “invest massively” in the ecological transition. As if the “whatever the cost” inaugurated during the Covid-19 pandemic could last to eternal life for large companies, but that it now had to be financed in return by savings to be made on social policies.
Since the fall, the speech of the executive to justify the pension reform has been refined. It no longer claims to use the expected savings to finance other public policies: “Every euro from the pension reform will be spent on pensions”, affirms the minister delegate in charge of public accounts, Gabriel Attal, in order to try to close the debate. To justify postponing the legal age to 64 and accelerating the extension of the contribution period to forty-three annual installments, the Elysée and Matignon now claim to want “save the pay-as-you-go system”which would be threatened by an unsustainable annual deficit of 12 billion euros produced by the increase in the number of retirees and the lengthening of the time spent in retirement.
The president of the Pensions Orientation Council, heard Thursday, January 19 in the National Assembly, swept away this justification. Pierre-Louis Bras pointed out that “pension spending is not getting out of control[ai]ent not »that they were even “generally stabilized and under control” but that they were not “not compatible with the economic policy and public finance objectives of the government”. In other words: it is because the government wants to contain the increase in public spending to 0.6% per year by 2027 that it is using our pension system, which accounts for a quarter of these expenses.
An austerity that does not say its name
It is no secret, moreover: the 2023 finance law indicates in black and white that the reform of pensions as well as that of unemployment insurance must “contribute to the control of public expenditure”. This is also the meaning of the commitments made by the executive to Brussels during the implementation of the 2020 recovery plan and during the presentation of the stability program 2022-2027. In other words, rather than “save the pay-as-you-go pension system” and ensure long-term financing, the executive seeks above all to make savings on the back of national solidarity and future retirees. It is an austerity measure that does not say its name.
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