“Those who offer retirement at 60 are lying to the French”, insists Bruno Le Maire

“The ulterior motive of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s project: the less we work, the better we are! He even promises a return to 32 hours!” exclaimed the Minister of Economy, Finance and Recovery, Bruno Le Maire, during the Grand Rendez-vous d’Europe 1 / CNews / Les Echos on Sunday. With the approach of the legislative elections, the pension reform announced in “summer 2023” by Emmanuel Macron continues to make people react.

First objective of the five-year term: “full employment”

This is one of the dividing subjects between the alliance of the left, the Nupes, and the majority united under the banner Together. For Bruno Le Maire, the pension reform would make it possible to “finance the social protection system and finance the retirement of the French on a pay-as-you-go basis”. Conversely, “those who offer retirement at 60 are lying to the French”, he insisted, referring to one of the Nupes proposals as well as to Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

“I characterize it by three things: by its authoritarianism, look at its project, it is full of obligations and constraints, by the collectivization of the means of production, the refusal of work and by a communitarian project in which the nation is not no longer a universal and united nation,” he said.

“We keep an unemployment rate which is still too high,” he acknowledged. “The first objective of the five-year term is full employment, then we will ensure that we do not have the lowest rate of people over 55 working in developed countries, this is the objective of the reform retirements.”