Will the 2023 pension reform pushed by Macron’s allies be put on hold in the National Assembly in hopes of reaching an agreement with the Socialists? No matter. The president of Renaissance, Gabriel Attal, wants to leap over this painful moment for his party by promoting his *own* reform — one he fully intends to put on the table during the next presidential election. In the meantime, he will turn it into a draft bill, even though it has no chance of being adopted before 2027. **His mantra: end the endless series of parametric reforms that chase after financial balance without ever achieving it.**
# One single system.
Gabriel Attal wants to change everything. **He promises to eliminate any reference to a legal retirement age, which has become a political red flag**. This would make France a global outlier. “Because of all the exceptions built into our system, when the legal retirement age is raised by two years, as in the 2023 reform, it only increases the *actual* average retirement age of the French by six months,” he argues. **The former prime minister proposes switching to a system in which everyone is free to retire whenever they choose.**
**This system resembles the universal pension scheme proposed by Emmanuel Macron in 2019, which was abandoned due to Covid**. It would revive the same idea: merging roughly forty existing pension regimes into a single one, where each euro contributed over a person’s career grants the same retirement rights. Unlike the 2019 reform, however, the basic unit of this system would not be expressed in points. **“We very quickly saw growing anxiety around one question: what will the value of a point be when I retire, and could it go down? A points-based system made people fear their pensions would be trimmed,” Attal explains.**
**Retirement rights accumulated over a career would therefore be expressed in euros, and they would need to be revalued over time so they are not eroded by inflation**. They could be indexed to prices, just like salaries currently are in the annuity-based system. Another option would be to adjust them at the same pace as GDP growth, as in Italy, possibly reduced by a coefficient reflecting demographic changes to account for the shifting ratio of workers to retirees, as in Germany. These choices would be left to employers’ organizations and labor unions, who would run the system **and be required to observe a fiscal “golden rule” of financial balance**. As with private-sector complementary pensions, the annual revaluation of pensions would be determined by the social partners.
WAGRAMWAGRAM on
I post this here, because while Attal isn’t even the leading candidate for the Center in 2027 he often comes up with weird harebrained schemes and it’s weird to see something so radical even flaunted
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Will the 2023 pension reform pushed by Macron’s allies be put on hold in the National Assembly in hopes of reaching an agreement with the Socialists? No matter. The president of Renaissance, Gabriel Attal, wants to leap over this painful moment for his party by promoting his *own* reform — one he fully intends to put on the table during the next presidential election. In the meantime, he will turn it into a draft bill, even though it has no chance of being adopted before 2027. **His mantra: end the endless series of parametric reforms that chase after financial balance without ever achieving it.**
# One single system.
Gabriel Attal wants to change everything. **He promises to eliminate any reference to a legal retirement age, which has become a political red flag**. This would make France a global outlier. “Because of all the exceptions built into our system, when the legal retirement age is raised by two years, as in the 2023 reform, it only increases the *actual* average retirement age of the French by six months,” he argues. **The former prime minister proposes switching to a system in which everyone is free to retire whenever they choose.**
**This system resembles the universal pension scheme proposed by Emmanuel Macron in 2019, which was abandoned due to Covid**. It would revive the same idea: merging roughly forty existing pension regimes into a single one, where each euro contributed over a person’s career grants the same retirement rights. Unlike the 2019 reform, however, the basic unit of this system would not be expressed in points. **“We very quickly saw growing anxiety around one question: what will the value of a point be when I retire, and could it go down? A points-based system made people fear their pensions would be trimmed,” Attal explains.**
**Retirement rights accumulated over a career would therefore be expressed in euros, and they would need to be revalued over time so they are not eroded by inflation**. They could be indexed to prices, just like salaries currently are in the annuity-based system. Another option would be to adjust them at the same pace as GDP growth, as in Italy, possibly reduced by a coefficient reflecting demographic changes to account for the shifting ratio of workers to retirees, as in Germany. These choices would be left to employers’ organizations and labor unions, who would run the system **and be required to observe a fiscal “golden rule” of financial balance**. As with private-sector complementary pensions, the annual revaluation of pensions would be determined by the social partners.
I post this here, because while Attal isn’t even the leading candidate for the Center in 2027 he often comes up with weird harebrained schemes and it’s weird to see something so radical even flaunted