{"id":390822,"date":"2025-09-02T02:55:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T02:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/390822\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T02:55:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T02:55:16","slug":"waking-france-up-to-the-boomer-pension-timebomb-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/390822\/","title":{"rendered":"Waking France up to the boomer pension timebomb \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe 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,\u201d he added. This ignorance, he said, is leading France toward a brutal, painful adjustment of its social system.<\/p>\n

To the guillotine!<\/p>\n

France’s pensions bill accounts for one-quarter<\/a> 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 \u20ac839 billion increase in public debt between 2018 and 2023, former Treasury official Jean-Pascal Beaufret warned<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor us millennials, Bayrou’s speech about boomers \u2026 will be our Robespierre at the Convention of the 8th of Thermidor,\u201d Ronan Planchon, a journalist for the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, wrote<\/a> on X, a reference to how the French revolutionary leader was sent to the guillotine after denouncing his own compatriots.<\/p>\n

\"\"Bayrou has warned the biggest victims of the ballooning debt will be young people.\u00a0 | Alain Jocard\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Pensions have long been a political taboo, with France nearly always seeing street protests whenever an overhaul is mooted. Fresh demonstrations<\/a> are planned for Sept. 10.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s wealth and savings<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe French are not aware of the demographic situation in France, they think that France is a young…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[10105,1194,29,135451,6659,2825,68102,2266,7151,2000,299,20327,474,36,37,3941,11524,476,1196,1197,2199,2441,2452,5111,617,2343,48,182,104,2824],"class_list":{"0":"post-390822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-argentina","9":"tag-budget","10":"tag-career","11":"tag-credit-rating-agencies","12":"tag-crisis","13":"tag-debt","14":"tag-demographics","15":"tag-education","16":"tag-eric-lombard","17":"tag-eu","18":"tag-europe","19":"tag-eurozone","20":"tag-finance","21":"tag-france","22":"tag-francois-bayrou","23":"tag-health-care","24":"tag-inequality","25":"tag-inflation","26":"tag-insurance","27":"tag-investment","28":"tag-italy","29":"tag-markets","30":"tag-media","31":"tag-parliament","32":"tag-pensions","33":"tag-research","34":"tag-rights","35":"tag-social-media","36":"tag-spain","37":"tag-tanks"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115132453593657196","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}