Umair
Prime Minister François Bayrou of France said on Tuesday that he was open to changing the country’s unpopular pension law, which raised the retirement age to 64 from 62, as he sought to build support in Parliament and keep his government afloat.
The 2023 law was championed by President Emmanuel Macron in the name of fiscal responsibility but led to mass street demonstrations.
Mr. Bayrou, a centrist and longtime ally of Mr. Macron who was appointed just last month, laid out his plan for discussing changes to the retirement law in a speech to the National Assembly, the fractious lower house of Parliament. He also presented, for the first time, his broader vision for 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, in the past few months, to agree on a 2025 budget.
This lack of agreement last month led to a no-confidence vote and the fall of the government led by Mr. Bayrou’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Michel Barnier.
Mr. Bayrou’s new government also finds itself in a precarious situation, and could fall any day. The move on Tuesday appeared to be an effort to at least buy some time.
Much of the trouble stems from the situation France finds itself in as it faces a ballooning debt and deficit and a weak economy. Mr. Bayrou said that the government had revised its growth forecast downward for 2025, to 0.9 percent from 1.1 percent. The public deficit, he said, was expected to amount to 5.4 percent of France’s gross domestic product, up from a previous government projection of 5 percent.
Mr. Bayrou, like his predecessor, has little room to maneuver between pro-business lawmakers wary of levying new taxes on commerce, and other lawmakers — including leftists and far-right populists — who do not want to roll back social spending.
In his speech, Mr. Bayrou said his plan would allow for a reconsideration of the key provision of the 2023 law that critics found to be the most unpalatable: the progressive ratcheting up of the retirement age from 62 to 64 years of age.
But Mr. Bayrou also referred to the country’s indebtedness as a “sword of Damocles” over France, and said that any changes to the retirement law should be financially sound.
“We cannot allow the financial balance that we seek, and on which almost everyone agrees, to deteriorate,” he said.
Mr. Macron has argued that the retirement overhaul will keep France’s pension system healthy as life expectancy rises and as the ratio of workers to retirees decreases. But it touched off fury in a country where retirement is not seen as an option for older people, as it sometimes is in countries like the U.S., but as more of a right.
As the changes were being debated, critics turned out in the streets for weeks of strikes and mass rallies, some of which turned violent. They were further angered when Mr. Macron’s government pushed the pension bill through Parliament in March 2023 without a full vote.
It was a dramatic expenditure of political capital for Mr. Macron, who ran for president in 2017 as someone more interested in pragmatism than political ideology. Since the passage of the law, his approval numbers have declined.
He was not helped by his decision this summer to dissolve Parliament and call for snap elections, which, as even Mr. Macron recently conceded, only increased France’s political instability. His term ends in 2027.
The threats to Mr. Bayrou’s government remain severe. Even before the prime minister’s speech on Tuesday, the far-left France Unbowed party said that it would pursue a no-confidence vote.
The far-right National Rally has not gone that far. But its stance toward Mr. Bayrou falls somewhere between skepticism and outright hostility. Just after the speech, Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, wrote on social media that Mr. Bayrou offered little more than “soft continuity, chattering and ‘endless’ consultation.”
Broaching the topic of the retirement overhaul law may allow Mr. Bayrou to at least temporarily peel away members of the more moderate Socialist Party from the leftist bloc in the legislature. A nonaggression pact between the Socialists and centrist and center-right lawmakers who favor Mr. Bayrou could give him enough support in the legislature to survive any assault from the far-left and the extreme right.
Mr. Bayrou said he would ask a government auditing agency to analyze the current reform law. After that, he said, he would create a special group made up of union members and business representatives, and give them three months to discuss any changes.
If the group could not come to an agreement, he said, the current law would remain untouched.
In a TV interview on Tuesday night, Olivier Faure, the first secretary of the Socialist Party, said he was pleased that the retirement law was once again up for debate. “It’s the first time in two years that someone in the government admitted that this reform is unjust,” he said.
But Mr. Faure did not answer directly when asked if his party would support a no-confidence vote.
Mr. Bayrou, 73, a veteran lawmaker and member of the moderate Mouvement Démocrate party, is acutely aware of the challenge he faces. He has said in recent weeks that France is facing the “most difficult” situation since the end of World War II, describing the political situation as a “Himalaya.”
Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at the University of Nice said that Mr. Bayrou seemed to avoid any missteps on Tuesday as he plotted out his next round of moves. “He’s trying to calm things down, and this goes hand in hand with a general vagueness about what he intends to do,” he said.
