“The French are not aware of the demographic situation in France, they think that France is a young country, that we can stop working at 60, there is a kind of collective imagination that is difficult to shake,” he added. This ignorance, he said, is leading France toward a brutal, painful adjustment of its social system.
To the guillotine!
France’s pensions bill accounts for one-quarter of all government spending; Italy is the only European country paying out a larger share proportionate to its economy. Pensions account for over half of France’s €839 billion increase in public debt between 2018 and 2023, former Treasury official Jean-Pascal Beaufret warned.
“For us millennials, Bayrou’s speech about boomers … will be our Robespierre at the Convention of the 8th of Thermidor,” Ronan Planchon, a journalist for the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, wrote on X, a reference to how the French revolutionary leader was sent to the guillotine after denouncing his own compatriots.
Bayrou has warned the biggest victims of the ballooning debt will be young people. | Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images
Pensions have long been a political taboo, with France nearly always seeing street protests whenever an overhaul is mooted. Fresh demonstrations are planned for Sept. 10.
But given the country’s aging population, politicians are reluctant to challenge a group that represents a big slice of their vote, and that holds the lion’s share of the country’s wealth and savings.
Compared to other items on the budget, pensions are particularly hard to adjust, said Hippolyte d’Albis, an economist and professor at the ESSEC Business School.