French Prime Minister François Bayrou said on Tuesday he was open to changing the country’s unpopular pension law, which raised the retirement age to 64 from 62, as he seeks to build support in parliament and keep his government alive.
The 2023 law was championed by President Emmanuel Macron in the name of fiscal responsibility but led to massive street protests.
Mr. Bayrou, centrist and longtime ally of Mr. Macron, who was appointed last month, outlined his plan to debate changes to the pension law in a speech to the National Assembly, the divisive lower house of parliament. He also presented for the first time his broader vision of governing the country.
There is no clear majority in the National Assembly, and its three general factions – left, center and far right – have been unable to agree on a 2025 budget in recent months.
This lack of agreement last month led to a confidence vote and the fall of the government led by Mr. Bayrou’s predecessorformer Prime Minister Michel Barnier.
Mr. Bayrou’s new government is also in a precarious situation and could fall any day. The move on Tuesday appears to have been an attempt to at least buy some time.
Much of the problem stems from the situation in France finds himself while facing a growing debt and deficit and a weak economy. Mr Bayrou said the government had revised down its growth forecast for 2025, to 0.9 per cent from 1.1 per cent. The public deficit, he said, is expected to amount to 5.4 percent of France’s gross domestic product, compared to previous government projection of 5 percent.
Mr. Bayrou, like his predecessor, has little room to maneuver between pro-business lawmakers who are wary of imposing new taxes on trade and other lawmakers – including leftists and far-right populists – who do not want to cut welfare spending.
In his speech, Mr. Bayrou said his plan would allow for a review of a key provision of the 2023 law that critics found most distasteful: a progressive increase in the retirement age from 62 to 64.
But Mr. Bayrou also called the country’s indebtedness a “Sword of Damocles” over France and said any changes to pension laws should be financially sound.
“We cannot allow the financial balance that we are striving for, and on which almost everyone agrees, to deteriorate,” he said.
Mr Macron argued that pension reform would keep France’s pension system healthy as life expectancy rises and the ratio of workers to pensioners shrinks. But it has sparked outrage in a country where retirement is not seen as an option for older people, as it sometimes is in countries like the US, but more of a right.
As the changes were debated, critics took to the streets for weeks of strikes and mass rallies, some of which turned violent. They got even more angry when the government of Mr. Macron pushed the draft pension law through parliament in March 2023 without a full vote.
It was a dramatic waste of political capital for Mr. Macron, who ran for president in 2017 as someone more interested in pragmatism than political ideology. Since the adoption of the law, its approval numbers have refused.
He was not helped by his decision this summer to dissolve parliament and call early elections, which, as even Mr Macron recently admitted, only increased France’s political instability. His term ends in 2027.
Threats to Mr. Bayrou’s government remain serious. Even before the prime minister’s speech on Tuesday, the far-left France Unbowed party said it would go ahead with the confidence vote.
The far-right National Assembly did not go that far. But her attitude towards Mr. Bayrouu is somewhere between skepticism and open hostility. Immediately after the speech, Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, wrote on social networks that Mr. Bayrou offered little more than “soft continuity, chatter and ‘endless’ consultation.”
Bringing up the topic of the pension reform bill could allow Mr. Bayrou to at least temporarily unstick members of the more moderate Socialist Party from the leftist bloc in the legislature. A non-aggression pact between the Socialists and the centre-right MPs who favor Mr Bayrou could give him enough support in the legislature to survive any attack from the far left and extreme right.
Mr. Bayrou said he would ask the government’s audit agency to analyze the current reform law. After that, he said, he will form a special group made up of trade unionists and representatives of the economy, and give them three months to discuss possible changes.
If the group can’t reach an agreement, he said, the current law will remain intact.
In a TV interview on Tuesday night, Olivier Faure, first secretary of the Socialist Party, said he was pleased that the pension law was back under discussion. “It’s the first time in two years that someone in the government has admitted that this reform is unfair,” he said.
But Mr Faure did not directly answer a question about whether his party would support a confidence vote.
Mr. Bayrou, 73, a veteran lawmaker and member of the moderate Mouvement Démocrate party, is well aware of the challenges he faces. He said in recent weeks that France was facing “the hardest” situation since the end of World War II, describing the political situation as “the Himalayas”.
Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at the University of Nice, said Mr. Bayrou avoided any missteps Tuesday as he mapped out his next round of moves. “He’s trying to calm things down, and that goes hand in hand with a general lack of clarity about what he intends to do,” he said.
