Since 2017 when Emmanuel Macron made pension reform the heart of his campaign, things have changed a lot. Initially, Emmanuel Macron proposed to abolish the special pension schemes, from which some employees benefit, and to put in place the same rules for calculating pensions, to end up with a single model.
From September 2017, Jean-Paul Delevoye, a senior official will quickly become the “retirement man” and is appointed to work on this reform. In July 2019, Jean-Paul Delevoye presented his report. He proposes the creation of a universal point-based retirement system with, in particular, a “pivot age”, set at 64 years. Concretely, this means that workers can retire at 62, but that they will only benefit from a full pension if they retire at 64.
In September, a strong social mobilization takes place. RATP agents, but also lawyers, doctors, liberal nurses, pilots, flight attendants and stewards take to the streets to defend their pension plans. In December 2019, RATP and SNCF voted for a renewable strike that will last more than a month. On December 16, weakened by suspicions of conflicts of interest, Jean-Paul Delevoye resigned from the government. He is replaced by Laurent Pietraszewski.
In March 2020, France is facing the Covid-19 pandemic. “I have decided that all ongoing reforms will be suspended, starting with the pension reform“, then argued the Head of State on March 16 during his first televised address in this context of health crisis.
A few months later, in July 2021, he declared: “We will have to initiate, as soon as sanitary conditions are met, the pension reform. “But, during his last televised address, Emmanuel Macron returned to this previous statement:”The health situation we are experiencing and which is deteriorating throughout Europe, the unanimous desire expressed by trade unions and professional organizations to concentrate efforts on recovery, the need for harmony in this moment that our Nation is living through, mean that the conditions are not met to relaunch this project today. “