Since the start of the debates on the pension reform and the announcement of the postponement of the legal retirement age from 62 to 64, an excerpt from an old speech by Emmanuel Macron has been circulating widely. In the video, dated April 25, 2019, we can hear the head of state calling such a step back “quite hypocritical.”
“Should the legal age be raised, which is now 62? I don’t think so,” he said then.
“When today we are poorly qualified, when we live in a region in industrial difficulty, when we ourselves are in difficulty, when we have a fractured career, good luck already reaching 62 years of age,” argued Emmanuel Macron. “That is the reality of our country.”
The Head of State was questioned this Wednesday about this past extract and for him, the current situation is not at all comparable to that of 2019. “The mandate that I asked for in 2022 was not that of 2017 because the country was not the same.” he assures.
“The mandate that I have in 2017 is to create a universal pension system, in no way change the retirement age,” he recalls, but in 2022 “the situation is drastically different.”
“The problem of unemployment in our country”
Emmanuel Macron points to the unemployment rate on the one hand. In 2019 he declared that “until we have solved the unemployment problem in our country, it would frankly be quite hypocritical to change the legal age.” In short, since it is difficult to find a job, especially for the elderly, it seems difficult to ask for more time to contribute.
The president stressed this Wednesday that he was speaking then of 2019 “in a society that has an unemployment rate of more than 8%.” According to the latest INSEE report, in the fourth quarter of 2022 the unemployment rate was lower, standing at 7.2% of the active population (excluding Mayotte).
Toujours d’après les données de l’Insee, on trouvait in 2019 568,000 chômeurs over 50 years old, against 498,000 in 2022. Toutefois, the ministère du Travail notait en début d’année that the taux d’emploi chute très fortement après 60 years. On the other hand, the unemployment rate of the elderly tends to stagnate, while it falls in the other age categories.
Emmanuel Macron adds that the work orders, which were put in place to renew social dialogue and labor relations, had only been in force for 18 months in 2019: “They have been in the works for six years,” he says. beneficial effects on employment.
“Our accounts have deteriorated”
To ensure the need for reform, he also invokes the economic difficulties that have arisen in four years: “We had the Covid, we had the war, we had inflation… The nation has spent tens of billions of euros to protect itself, it has therefore we accumulate a debt, which we pay off over time and our accounts have deteriorated.
“All the experts say ‘you have a problem with your pension system,’” the President of the Republic still assures, who reiterated that this reform was necessary today to perpetuate it.
Emmanuel Macron is not the first whose past statements, in contrast to today’s, are remembered. When he was a Socialist deputy, Olivier Dussopt, now Minister of Labor, strongly opposed the pension reform advocated by the government of François Fillon. It was then about passing the same age from 60 to 62 years.
Source: BFM TV
