The whole challenge for Emmanuel Macron will be to make the French accept a gradual increase in the starting age to 64 or 65, a measure to which they are 80% opposed.
In a France which has gained 15 years of life expectancy for women and 13 years for men in 50 years, where the number of contributors has fallen from 4 to 1.3 for a retiree since 1960, no other choice than working longer to preserve the pay-as-you-go pension system, where working people finance the pensions of their elders. The whole challenge for Emmanuel Macron will now be to make the French accept a gradual increase in the retirement age to 64 or 65, a measure to which they are 80% opposed.
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This will not be an easy task, as evidenced by the endless debates in 2019 around the pivotal age, desired by Édouard Philippe in the Delevoye reform, which was ultimately aborted. Even if the opinion has matured for five years, the subject remains explosive, and the unions – including the CFDT, however favorable to the universal system – are all up against the raising of the legal age. And the pressure is likely to go up another notch with the removal promised by the president of…
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