Macron insists retirement age will rise to 65

French president will see through campaign pledge that provoked months of unrest in his first term

EMMANUEL MACRON will push back the official retirement age in France to 65 from 62 if re-elected, his government confirmed yesterday, in a move that is likely to reignite a fraught debate on pensions that provoked months of strikes in his first term. After enacting business-friendly labour reforms early in his five-year mandate, the French president had hoped to overhaul the country’s generous and unwieldy pensions, merging 42 separate schemes into a points-based “universal” system in the biggest shake-up since the Second World War.

However, his proposal infuriated the unions and prompted weeks of protests before the pandemic hit. Mr Macron put the plan on hold when he ordered France into lockdown in spring 2020.

Last July, he promised he would deliver the campaign pledge, but only if France’s health situation returned to normal. He also said special pension regimes in highly unionised and strikeprone sectors such as public transport would be scrapped for new recruits.

One of the most contentious issues was whether to raise the official retirement age. His government initially mooted the idea of bumping it up to 64. Now Mr Macron, 44, has pledged to go further, with his government yesterday confirming that he would gradually raise the end date to 65 by 2032.

“We have to accept that we must work for longer to continue to have a social model that can be maintained and correspond to rising life expectancy,” Mr Macron told MPS from his LREM Party in Paris on Wednesday.

His aides said he also wanted the minimum pension to be set at €1,100 (£923) a month. Many pensioners, often agricultural workers, scrape by with only €300-€400 currently.

Mr Macron is not the only presidential candidate proposing to raise the retirement age: conservative rival Valérie Pécresse has made the same pledge, while far-right runner Eric Zemmour has mentioned the figure of 64. However, Mr Zemmour’s nationalist rival Marine Le Pen – who polls suggest will reach the presidential run-off – wants to bring it down to 60 for those who started working at 20, a similar pledge to Leftist candidate Jean-luc Mélenchon, who is gaining traction in voter intentions.

Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo wants to keep it at 62, saying there was a “fundamental hypocrisy” in raising the retirement age given that France had “one of the lowest rates of employment for seniors in Europe”.

In a sign that Mr Macron can expect stiff resistance to the idea, Laurent Berger, head of the moderate CFDT union, which had backed his previous points-based pension reform plan, called it “brutal”.

He said: “To push back the retirement age penalises more broken-up careers, as well as arduous professions, those who started working young. It is a reform we will fight because it’s unfair.”

Riding high in the polls and the runaway favourite, Mr Macron only officially announced his intention to stand for reelection last week.