Faced with the elected officials he rubs shoulders with, Pierre-Louis Bras willingly presents himself as a “mere technocrat”, A “grey civil servant”. Should we believe it? With his laughing eyes and his smile planted in the middle of a discreet salt-and-pepper beard, the man does not really look like the typical austere technician. But at the beginning of February, on the phone, he continues in the same vein: “Pierre-Louis Bras does not exist. I am president of the COR [Conseil d’orientation des retraites] and a priori I do not have to take the light. » No question therefore for him to pour out. “I don’t feel like putting a coin back in the machine at all,” he justifies, after having lived his Warholian quarter of an hour late, at 64 years old.
The “machine” got carried away on January 19, at the National Assembly. That day, the finance committee hears the president of the COR “on the prospects for the evolution of the pension system”. Usually not the flashy kind of meeting. Except that the appointment, fixed for a long time, is held on the same day of the first national mobilization against the pension reform. And it’s been weeks since the COR annual report, published in September 2022, invites itself into the debates. Each camp, pro- or anti-reform, cites it to consolidate its argument. At the head of the structure since 2015, Pierre-Louis Bras knows all this.
The annoyance of Elisabeth Borne
From his thirty minutes of presentation of the report, social networks loop a sentence on pension expenditure which “don’t slip”. They are “generally stabilized and even, in the very long term, decrease in three out of four hypotheses”, affirms Pierre-Louis Bras in front of the deputies, summarizing the document of the COR, long of 349 pages. The rest of his presentation, on the drop in resources and the deficits to come, will have less echo.
Opponents of the reform are having a blast with its release: hasn’t it just put the government’s narrative on the seriousness of the pension situation in France into perspective? On January 23, during her wishes to the press, Elisabeth Borne seems to question the impartiality of the senior official, reproaching him for a reading “quite personal” of the report. A week after the hearing on January 19, during the monthly meeting of the COR, far from the cameras, rebelote. Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, the chief economist of the general direction of the Treasury, grimaces: “The report is excellent, but the communication a failure. It would be necessary to simplify, to say that France is aging and that there is a problem of pensions. »
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