Wauquiez refuses any “suspension” of pension reform without a financing “scenario”

Usually discreet, Laurent Wauquiez raises his voice this Sunday evening. While François Bayrou is due to deliver his general policy speech to the National Assembly on Tuesday afternoon, the president of the Republican Right (DR) group fears, in an interview with Parisian , the outcome of negotiations on the 2025 budget between the left outside the LFI and the government, the objective of which remains to reach a non-censorship agreement with its opposition interlocutors. At the center of all attention: the arbitration which will be made in the coming hours on the latest pension reform.

If ecologists, socialists and communists hope to obtain a suspension – or even a repeal – of the gradual postponement of the legal age of departure to 64 years, the right sees in this request a red line which the executive should not cross. “Considering returning to pension reform without proposing the slightest funding avenue is irresponsible”warns Laurent Wauquiez. Who has “the feeling” what “the government’s priority” East “to negotiate life insurance with the Socialist Party” so as not to suffer the same sentence as Michel Barnier. And this, “whatever the consequences for the country”.

“The seriousness of the situation”

Despite the participation of the Republicans in the ruling coalition around François Bayrou, the former boss of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region urges the team in place to “don’t lose sight of the seriousness of the situation”. Either a “looming debt storm.” Without claiming that the reform adopted painfully in 2023 is not “perfect”Laurent Wauquiez refuses to “deepen even more deficits”. Strengthened by being at the head of an essential support force in the Lower House for the political survival of the Prime Minister, the deputy for Haute-Loire does not hesitate to put the support of his camp in the balance: “Suspending (the reform) without an alternative scenario is like jumping into the void without a parachute. It will be without the Republican Right.”

A first warning which precedes another. In view of the 2025 budget which will be studied in the coming weeks in Parliament, Laurent Wauquiez does not intend to “vote a budget with new tax increases.” “There is too much public spending and therefore too many taxes and charges,” adds the leader of the Republican deputies, whose “priority is to have a budget that protects the French from a debt crisis.”