“The contribution to the national recovery from the more well-off pensioners, for example through a more moderate indexation of their pensions, is a matter worth considering,” wrote the Minister of Economy and Finance, Roland Lescure, on Monday on the Bluesky network, according to Efe.
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The minister was responding to the criticisms of one of his predecessors in the position and former European commissioner, Thierry Breton, who on Sunday in an interview with the BFMTV channel reproached the Government for freezing the pension reform at the beginning of the year, which was supposed to postpone the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 years.
For Breton, the Government wanted to save face in January with that suspension of the reform – it was the socialists’ demand not to bring it down in a vote of no confidence – and now must face a decision with a solution that is worse for it, by penalizing current pensioners.
Lescure challenged the figures offered by Breton in his reasoning about the cost to public finances of that suspension of the pension reform.
Some experts have estimated that if pensions of those earning 3,000 euros gross were only revalued at half the inflation rate (which was 2.1% in July), that would only allow to raise 700 million euros, which would become 1.5 billion if applied to those earning more than 2,000 euros.
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That idea, which had been circulating for days without precise attribution, came a few weeks before the Government finalizes the 2027 budget project, which is an election year, with the presidential elections scheduled for April 18 and May 2.
In elections in which the vote of pensioners will be very important, knowing that it is a very large group (almost 25% of the population) and one with a higher level of participation.
France was in 2025 the second country in the eurozone with the highest deficit, only behind Belgium, with a 5.1% of GDP, according to Efe.
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