Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via AP
Young people take part in a rally in Paris on January 21, 2023, protesting the pension reform bill presented by the French government that would increase the national retirement age to 64.
French President Emmanuel Macron is going through his own Dobbs decision backlash.
In an effort to reduce his nation’s pension costs and presumably make its economy more competitive, he’s proposed to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.
He’s encountered a couple of problems along the way. First, France’s public pension system is a notable success, yielding one of the lowest elderly poverty rates on the planet. Second, the French people have now been making life plans premised on retirement at 62 for more than a dozen years. Upping that by two years takes away a fundamental assurance on which the French have depended.
Which is why a million Parisians took to the streets last week in protest. Which is why a recent poll showed that 68 percent of Macron’s compatriots oppose raising the age.
Which is why Macron is stumbling down the same path that our own Republicans have been taking in revoking Roe v. Wade and seeking to outlaw abortion. People don’t usually respond gently to the imposed withdrawal of what they’ve long taken to be their fundamental rights.
Actually, the French have been down this road before. In 2010, Macron’s fellow conservative and presidential predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy managed to persuade parliament to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, which, then as now, provoked a massive outburst of popular rage.
The French enragés have history on their side. As CUNY history professor David Troyansky has documented, France began the selective provision of old-age pensions even before the 1789 revolution, and they kicked in at age 60. Straight through the revolution, the reign of Napoleon, the return of the Bourbons, and all the subsequent regimes of the 19th and 20th centuries, those pensions, gradually extended to the entire 60-plus population, remained intact.
So what Macron is proposing to do is to alter a program that’s both highly successful and highly popular, and well established (to put it mildly) as a fundamental right of the French people. As both the right-wing nationalists of the Le Pen movement and the multiple varieties of French socialists oppose this measure, Macron may have a harder time enacting his work-longer proposal than Sarkozy had enacting his.
If there’s a lesson here for the congressional Republicans who are calling for raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare, they don’t seem to be taking it. Then again, their continuing push to ban and restrict abortions already demonstrates an imperviousness to popular will—in particular, to the hard fact that people, as such, usually don’t take well to having long-established fundamental rights stripped away from them, as Emmanuel Macron is now learning the hard way.
