With more than two-thirds of French people in the polls still saying they are opposed to pension reform, it is clear that the government has definitively lost the battle of public opinion. She was truly lost in advance. It is difficult to see how a reform which, contrary to the words of the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt, constitutes a social regression could have aroused the enthusiasm of the crowds.
It is difficult to see how a reform that is financially justified but which requires individual effort and sacrifice, which objectively results in infinitely more losers than winners, which finally increases the time of life spent working and decreases that of old age devoted to rest and recreation could have won the support of the French. Not through the fault of neoliberal policies but because of the aging of the population, the lengthening of life expectancy and the problems of financing which result from this, the era of happy pension reforms which lowered the retirement age legal is long gone in Western countries.
It is illusory to think under these conditions that further consultation with unions convinced anyway, CFDT included, that the improvement of individual and collective economic well-being necessarily involves the reduction of working time would have made it possible to coax Laurent Berger and Philippe Martinez. Or that a less messy government communication and ministers endowed with a minimum of pedagogical talent would have made the reform more acceptable in the eyes of the French. The latter are not economically masochistic and the pension reform was no more likely to be popular than a tax hike.
On the other hand, the question arises of its timing, of knowing if the moment was right to launch it, given the psychological fragility of a country barely recovered from the Covid crisis and above all from the particularly difficult economic context that is stagflation.
In his seminal empirical work on the conditions for successful structural reform, OECD economist William Thompson observes that “the probability of adoption or blockage is the same in periods of expansion or downturn in business”. “Pension reforms were launched in a situation ranging from a deep recession to strong growth,” he said. Since the costs and benefits of pension reforms are felt in the very long term, cyclical fluctuations should not be expected to have a strong influence on pension reform policy. He notes, however, that sound public finances are proving more conducive to initiating structural reforms. This is certainly not the case for France with its 165 billion euros budget deficit forecast for 2023 and its 3,000 billion euros in public debt.
Added to this is the unprecedented context since the 1980s of high inflation which is eroding purchasing power. The government hopes, not without cynicism, to find there an ally of circumstance able to avoid the economic blockage of the country, by dissuading the strikers from continuing in the long term a movement which costs them personally very expensive. An eminently risky bet when you know to what extent inflation, in particular food inflation as is the case today, has always and everywhere been a tremendous detonator of social anger and popular revolts. More than tax hikes, unemployment, inequality and even the thirst for freedom. From Roman Emperor Diocletian to the Arab Springs to the French Revolution, history shows that there is no greater threat to the powers that be than a spike in flour prices.
Make no mistake about it. Demonstrations against pension reform are also demonstrations against inflation and declining purchasing power. With this paradox that the most effective way to advance it in a sustainable way would be to individually and collectively increase the amount of work in our country, which a vast majority of French people stubbornly refuse.
Consult our file: Inflation, the great threat
