QWhat will be the political cost of the pension reform presented by the government? Its budgetary challenge is known: to make rapid savings in the pension system, at the cost of months and then additional years of work imposed on the French. As for the political challenge of the reform, it seems to be to display a reforming will, to trap the Republican right, and to pass without too much difficulty the winter of the demonstrations. The history and comparison of pension reforms teach us, however, that the political consequences of unpopular reforms are measured in the medium term, in the elections that follow the measures announced.
Thus, the Juppé plan in 1995, which provided for the alignment of special pension schemes with the new rules imposed on the private sector in 1993 – which provoked numerous demonstrations in the autumn of 1995 and a “proxy strike” by the French – led to the loss of the legislative elections by the right after the dissolution of 1997, when the Prime Minister, Alain Juppé, had to give up his plans. It was the plural left of Lionel Jospin, and the National Front, which reached the second round of the presidential election of 2002, which benefited from this result. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy imposed a reform of the special regimes, then an unexpected reform of the retirement age (from 60 to 62 years old), in 2010. He failed to be re-elected in 2012, and the opposition, still the left, came to power.
François Hollande had promised to reconsider the reform of 2010, but that adopted in 2013 (known as the “Touraine reform”) maintained the 62 years (with however the possibility of leaving earlier), decided to move to forty-three years of contributions for a full pension (by 2035) and has frozen the revaluation of the level of pensions for several years. This reversal of electoral promises contributed to the collapse of the institutional left in favor of the parties of rupture: La France insoumise, the National Rally (RN) and En Marche!, which won the 2017 elections and narrowly the presidential election. of 2022 (but not the legislative ones).
The least qualified, the most affected
Who will be, under these conditions, the political winner of the hussard passage of an unpopular reform during the 2027 elections? The main opposition to the current majority is not the left, but the RN. Marine Le Pen took care to oppose this reform. This is logical, since his constituents will be among the most affected. Indeed, electoral studies show that the RN is the first party among the workers. However, they are among the social categories that start working the earliest and are therefore likely to have accumulated enough contributions around the age of 62, which will lead them to work “for free” (without earning new pension rights). They are also numerous to be part of the “neither in employment nor in retirement”, these French people who had to leave the labor market before the age of 62, and who do not understand that we are asking to work longer when companies have sought to get rid of them before the legal retirement age.
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