Tomorrow (Thursday) France will feel a bit like Britain has felt for the past couple of months, only more so. For the first time in more than a decade (since, in fact, the last serious presidential assault on pension rights), all eight of the country's major trade union federations will line up together to mount a day of stoppages and demonstrations that may not fall far short of a general strike. For sure, it is just one day. But no-one doubts there will be more.
Among the sectors likely to be affected are power stations, oil refineries, railways and road transport. Huge demonstrations are being organised for every city in France, and planning is under way for a series of similar protests in the near future. In addition, youth organisations are gearing up to be obstreperous, on the grounds that it is the young that will face the longest and rockiest road to pension. 'If the workers decide it,' says CGT leader Philippe Martinez, 'France will come to a halt'.
Readers sensing a certain déja vu about all this are not wrong. Strikes and demos are part and parcel of the French way of doing things, but you are also right to think that it's only a little while since all hell and high water was last being threatened over pension reform. Emmanuel Macron, not discreditably, had intended tackling France's expensive and anachronistic pensions system in his first term in the Élysée Palace, and the same forces were mustered to oppose him back then. In the event, it was Covid rather than critics that forced him to shelve his plans.
Now, safely re-elected for a final term, he is determined to get it done. He badly needs a signal domestic achievement to match the foreign policy exertions that have made him, post-Merkel, de facto leader of Europe, a diplomatic prestige that does not bestow much voter gratitude. Pensions, the issue on which so many of his predecessors have been forced to settle for piffling adjustments are the legacy he seeks. He is also convinced that it is necessary, both to stop the pensions system running out of money sooner rather than later, and to appease the international markets. The credit ratings agencies, those philosopher kings of global capitalism, have begun to rumble ominously about France's budget deficit. Sorting pensions wouldn't fix the deficit, but it would be the sort of gesture of intent that the market shamans like. Failure, equally, would be expensive.
The first hurdle Macron has to overcome is parliamentary, rather than popular, resistance. His centrist Ensemble party lost its majority in the Assemblée Nationale last June. The package unwrapped last Tuesday by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne is opposed not just by Jean-Luc Mélenchon's fractious NUPES alliance of the left, but also Marine Le Pen's far-right Rassemblement National. Assuming the hostiles hold firm, that leaves the government with two main choices, each carrying a cost.
Borne could invoke the notorious Article 49.3 of the constitution, which allows the government to ram through financial measures without Assemblée approval. It is a humiliating and censure-prone recourse, to which Borne was already forced to resort last October to get the budget adopted. It also needs the agreement of the upper house, the Senate; while a plan to syphon funds into pensions from the social security budget may need the judicial nod of the Conseil d'Etat.
Alternatively, the government could solicit the support of the conservative Républicains, diminished party of Chirac and Sarkozy, that is nevertheless finding a new role as custodians of the balance of parliamentary power. They are broadly supportive of the need for major pension reforms (actually, almost everyone agrees that something needs to be done: they just cannot agree on what). The problem here is that getting cosy with conservatives does Macron no favours with his own base.
Already, Borne's package contains some important compromises designed to lure the Républicains on board. Chief among these is that the initial intent of raising the state pension age from 62 to 65 has been pared back. There will now be a phased increase in three-monthly stages from September to take the legal retirement age to 64 by 2030. At the same time, the 'Touraine Law', the number of years of work required to qualify for a full pension (currently 43), having previously applied only to people born in 1973 and later, will now affect those born from 1965.
Offsetting the tighter provisions is an increase in the basic pension to 85% of the national minimum wage, for which a bigger category of retirees than previously indicated will qualify. This means a basic gross monthly pension, at present rates, of just under €1,200 per month. There will also be new measures to encourage recruitment of older workers and tougher regulations against workplace hazards.
There are special provisions on the retirement age for people in certain exceptionally tough lines of work or with particular health problems, but not nearly as many as before… which is perhaps the biggest provocation from the unions' point of view. France's pensions regime is not just generous, but also dauntingly complicated. An accumulation of deals done with various groups of workers over the decades has created 42 separate state-funded pension schemes under which specified groups are allowed to retire earlier than the norm. Some of these make obvious sense – no-one wants to rely on geriatric firefighters – others less so: notaries' clerks, for example, or Paris transport workers.
Borne's plans would scrap these special schemes for new recruits, and it is this as much as anything that will determine the shape and force of union protests in the weeks ahead. There is a not unreasonable perception on the left that the plans as written would hit the poorest hardest, because unskilled people go to work younger than graduates. The prospect of Republicain support for the package does nothing to dispel these suspicions.
The reforms would bring France more closely into line with other European countries, though it is not as far out of step with its continental neighbours as common perceptions suggest, especially as viewed from Gradgrind Britain. The average age at which French workers actually retire is broadly in line with the European norm. Nor is the current French pension age of 62 all that exceptional, being shared across much of southern Europe and Scandinavia. Lithuanians, lucky devils, pocket their pensions at 59. It is the same paradox that arises with France's legendarily short statutory working week. Overtime deals make the number of hours actually worked much like other people's. French productivity is roughly on a par with the UK.
That said, the French do see it as integral to their culture that they work to live, and not the other way around. The principle of working more hours, or years, than is strictly necessary jars. (Nominally) Catholic France has very little truck with the Protestant work ethic of northern Europe. As with so many plans for 'modernisation', especially those promoted by Emmanuel Macron, public antennae are alert for cultural contamination of le patrimoine by vulgar Anglo-American practices. In this way, the protests that lie ahead can lay some claim, however specious, to be mounted in defence not of special interests but of the national identity. To the barricades, mes braves.
Keith Aitken is a journalist, writer and broadcaster
