A step back is not desirable according to Pierre Moscovici. Guest of BFMTV this Thursday, October 23, the president of the Court of Auditors considered that reducing the legal retirement age to 60 years would be “extraordinarily expensive.”
“For a worker, when he retired at age 60, he had 5 years of life expectancy. Today it is no longer the same. Life expectancy is almost 80 years: more for women, a little less for men. It is even a little less for workers, which is also a problem, it is a matter of hardship,” explained the former European commissioner.
Therefore, retiring again at age 60 “is not relevant,” according to Pierre Moscovici. And this, “all the more so since we have this terrible problem of deterioration in the relationship between inactive and active, which means that our system is not sustainable,” he stressed. “We already have a deficit of 6.6 billion euros in the pension system. It will increase to 15 billion in 2035, provided the reform comes into force,” he added. The deficit would even reach 30 billion euros in 2045.
The suspension of the Borne reform integrated into the Social Security budget
This Thursday, the Government officially integrated, through a letter of amendment, into the Social Security financing bill (PLFSS) for 2026, the suspension of the pension reform until January 1, 2028. Thus, the legal age is frozen at 62 years and 9 months and the contribution period is set at 170 quarters for the generation born in 1964, which is the next to leave. retirement. Without the suspension, this generation would have had to wait three more months and therefore would have contributed an additional quarter.
Such a suspension should relaunch the debate on the pension system, on the eve of the presidential elections: while the pay-as-you-go system weakens, the leader of the CFDT, Marylise Léon, mentions the move to point-based retirement. In this way “the people [auraient] control over the age at which they want to leave,” he maintains. The CFTC also advocates a points system, considering the 42 different regimes unfair.
France, bad student of Europe
For his part, Pierre Moscovici refrains from making further comments on possible pension options. “It is quite logical in the end, you have a Parliament without a majority and you do not have any regulations for 49.3. So I really think that we should let the parliamentarians do their job and that in the end we will have to see what happened,” he considered.
But he maintains the same compass: “My concern is that the situation of public finances is not bad, it is very bad,” he insisted. “And I really hope that at the end of the parliamentary debate (…) we can reduce significantly, and even very significantly, France’s deficits. We have the most degraded public finances in Europe. That is my concern.”
Source: BFM TV
