“Emmanuel Macron no longer even tries to pretend and play the modernizer of the social state”

Dlet’s say it straight away: Macron is at the wrong time and is wasting our time. It applies recipes that are completely unsuited to the world of the 2020s, as if it had remained intellectually blocked in the era of the liberal euphoria of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, the world before the 2008 crisis, the Covid-19 and Ukraine.

The current context is, however, one of rising inequalities, wealth hyper-prosperity and the climate and energy crisis. The urgency is investment in training and health and the establishment of a fairer economic system, in France and in Europe, and even more so on an international scale. No matter: the government continues to pursue an anti-social policy from another age.

On pensions, Macron had tried, in 2019, to bring the idea of ​​a pension “universal”, with a unification of the rules between the regimes, which are indeed too complex. The problem is that he supported a very unequal universal pension, consisting roughly of perpetuating until death the abysmal inequalities of working life.

Many other universal pensions are possible, emphasizing small and medium-sized pensions, with a replacement rate varying with the level of salary, all financed by a progressive levy on income and assets (with, for example, the introduction of a general social contribution rate (CSG) of 2% on the 500 largest fortunes, which alone would bring in 20 billion euros).

Social and economic waste

Today, Macron no longer even tries to pretend and play the modernizer of the social state: the pension reform of 2023 simply aims to raise money, without any objective of universality or simplification. It is even the most opaque parametric reform one could have imagined.

The new rules on long careers are totally confused. The so-called measure on small pensions at 1,200 euros will ultimately concern less than 3% of retirees, and it will have taken the government a year to arrive at this still very approximate figure, when it has at its disposal all the apparatus of state and spends billions on consulting firms.

The reality, which is now impossible to hide, is that the efforts will fall above all on women with low and middle wages, who will have to work two more years in difficult and poorly paid jobs, while they are still in employment. .

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