Pensions: under pressure from the RN, Michel Barnier procrastinates on freezing pensions and is open to “other ideas”

The Prime Minister is procrastinating. Under pressure from Marine Le Pen and National Rally deputies, Michel Barnier said on Friday he was “open” to other solutions from deputies other than postponing the revaluation of retirement pensions. The government is in fact considering postponing by 6 months, from January 1 to July 1, 2025, the indexation of pensions to inflation, which would save 4 billion euros out of the 60 billion savings envisaged in the budget.

“I understand that this measure, which we put in the budget, a reevaluation which will take place in 2025 anyway, (…) provokes and creates concerns, especially for so many people who have small pensions,” admitted the Prime Minister on the sidelines of the Livestock Summit in Cournon-d’Auvergne (Puy-de-Dôme).

A publication by Marine Le Pen, on X (formerly Twitter) is at the origin of this clarification. “Shifting the indexation of pensions means stealing billions of euros of purchasing power from our seniors. I will refuse this measure, which is all the more petty as it leaked the day after Michel Barnier’s speech, silent on this maneuver already used by François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron,” wrote the far-right MP.

“Every day, revelations confirm that we were right to warn of the ruin of public accounts by the macronie with the complicity of the LR. The recovery of public accounts requires truth, courage and confidence, not blind and therefore unfair measures,” she added.

The text aiming to repeal the pension reform examined at the end of October

“It is a general effort which is requested, but I said (…) that if, in the parliamentary discussion which is open, which is free, there are new ideas or other ideas to find other means, I am open”, finally insisted Michel Barnier, slipping in that the leader of the Les Républicains deputies, Laurent Wauquiez, “told him the same thing” as the RN deputies.

Beyond budgetary considerations, Michel Barnier will soon have to face a bill from the National Rally aimed at repealing the pension reform to return to the legal age of 62. The deputy RN Thomas Ménage, rapporteur of this text which will be examined on October 31 in the Assembly, also wrote this Friday to the leaders of the main trade union centers to invite them to support the text as well as to meet them.

Arithmetically a majority exists to repeal the reform (126 RN deputies and 193 from the New Popular Front), but the question nags on the left, between the risk of disappointing voters and that of giving the RN the point. At this stage only the Socialists have ruled out voting on the text, calling for censorship of the Barnier government, and announcing that they would raise the subject by amendment to the Social Security budget and via a repeal text that LFI intends to include in its own ” niche” on November 28.