For President Emmanuel Macron, who is only eight months into his second 5-year term, the retirement overhaul is a crucial project. If he fails, “the image of Macron as a reformer is over,” said Bruno Cautrès, a researcher at Sciences Po in Paris, who cited little progress on overhauling the public sector and reducing the government deficit over the past five years.
The French left and far-right both oppose Macron’s retirement age plans. But with a number of conservative lawmakers having signaled support for Macron, the challenge for his government may be less to convince parliament — where it could ultimately push the law through with emergency constitutional powers — and more to get the French public on board. In a recent survey, more than two-thirds of respondents said they oppose the plans.
“The government has already lost the first battle,” far-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon said Thursday. “No one believes in the merit of the arguments presented by the government.”
More than 40 percent of primary schoolteachers were on strike, according to initial figures from the French Education Ministry. Unions said the ratio of striking primary schoolteachers was closer to 70 percent. In Paris, many metros and local trains were either completely suspended or running at significantly reduced capacity, and many high-speed trains across the country were canceled.
Speaking on French television, French union leader Philippe Martinez said “the question of pensions channels broader discontent,” signaling that the protests and strikes could widen in scope.
“France faces at least two months of strikes and street protests,” Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, wrote in an analysis. “The success or failure of this first day-of-action, called by all eight French trade union federations, will determine union and government tactics in the weeks ahead.”
Some are already drawing historical parallels to 1995, when much of France was disrupted by weeks of strikes after President Jacques Chirac’s government tried to increase the retirement eligibility age for public workers and planned other welfare cutbacks. The government under Chirac ultimately abandoned key parts of those plans.
Over two decades later, Macron’s own plans to raise the retirement age initially appeared stillborn in his first term. Even though union opposition was less united at the time than it is now, Macron’s plans prompted widespread protests in 2019 and 2020 and he eventually shelved the project, citing more pressing challenges prompted by the covid-19 pandemic.
When he sought reelection last year amid an emboldened far-right, Macron sent mixed messages on the issue. After first announcing that he wanted to raise the minimum retirement age even higher than planned, from 62 to 65, he later backtracked and said that “65 years is not a dogma.”
French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne has suggested that the government may be open to some adjustments, but she has defended the plan’s key proposal to raise the retirement age to 64 by 2030, saying it will bring about “social progress.”
The government argues that instead of having to bail out the country’s pension system, a higher retirement age would allow it allocate more spending to other areas where it is currently lacking.
The government has cited E.U.-wide data to justify its position. France has one of the lowest retirement ages among the 27 members of the European Union and its pension system is already financially strained. Many E.U. countries have legal retirement ages of 65 or 67, and some politicians in neighboring Germany think the legal age should soon become 70 as many European societies rapidly age.
But France is in a slightly more comfortable position, opponents of an increase here say, because its median age is still comparatively low. Whereas over-64-year-olds are estimated to account for 36 percent of the population in southern Europe by 2050, the ratio is projected to reach only 28 percent in France that year, according to the French National Institute for Demographic Studies.
Some of Macron’s critics also say the minimum retirement age of 62 isn’t relevant, because financial rewards already incentivize many French to stop working later than they would be allowed to, with the actual retirement age in the private sector being around 63 years.
Others on the left go even further, saying that the system is far from collapse and the legal retirement age of 60 should be restored.
Those arguments could re-energize the left-wing parliamentary alliance around Macron opponent Mélenchon, which was formed last year but has so far lacked common ground, said Cautrès, the Sciences Po researcher.
“It clearly creates a unifying topic,” he said.
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