Retirement: is a return of the legal retirement age to 62 possible after dissolution?

Capital Video: Retirement: is a return of the legal retirement age to 62 possible after dissolution?

The announcement was sudden. This Sunday, June 9, shortly after the results of the European elections, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, announced the dissolution of the National Assembly. The French will therefore have to go to the polls June 30 and July 7 for new legislative elections. What will the candidates propose? To find out their line of conduct on social issues such as retirement, all you have to do is dig out the archives and look again.The programs for the 2022 presidential election.

Arriving at the top of the European vote this Sunday, June 9, the National Rally (RN) had, at the time of the presidential election, a very precise program for retirement. The main idea: we do not touch the legal age. It remains at 62, but not for everyone. For those who started working early, presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, wanted to lower the legal age to 60. The principle: if your career began before the age of 20, you can retire with the full rate from the age of 60. Only obligation: to have contributed at least 160 quarters, or 40 years.

Different starting ages depending on your career

The National Rally therefore advocates more flexible conditions than those which have existed since the 2023 pension reform. Today, the early departure system for long careers makes it possible to cease one’s activity before the legal age, for those who have started to work young. To can retire at age 60you must have started working before the age of 18 and have contributed 172 quarters for those born from 1965, i.e. 12 quarters more than what the RN offers.

Still if we rely on the presidential program, the National Rally provides other exceptions for leaving before the legal age. So, if you enter working life at 21, Marine Le Pen’s party plans to retire from 61.5 years old, and to have contributed at least 163 quarters to obtain the full rate. Here again, more advantageous conditions than those existing today. If you started working before age 21, you can leave at age 63, one year before the legal age, provided you have contributed at least 172 quarters, starting from the generation born in 1965.

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A legal age of 62 proposed by several political parties

At the time of the presidential campaign, the National Rally was not the only party not wanting to touch the legal retirement age. The candidate of the Socialists, Anne Hidalgo, and that of the Greens, Yannick Jadot, also advocated for a status quo with maintaining the legal age at 62. Only Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France Insoumise) and Fabien Roussel (Communists) argued for retirement at 60.

Whatever the result of the legislative elections, if the future majority wants to touch the current pension reform, it will have to go through a new law. “Only a law can repeal a law… but I doubt it will happen”, estimates Philippe Blachèr, associate professor of public law and director of the Lyon constitutional law center. Because if a return of the retirement age to 62 is attractive, its cost can cool down in a period of economic scarcity. During the presidential campaign, Marine Le Pen’s campaign team estimated her pension reform at 9.6 billion euros per year, when it should come into full force. An underestimated figure according to the Institut Montaigne, a liberal think tank, which rather estimated 26.5 billion euros the amount of this reform which would affect a significant part of the generations who would retire in the years to come.

A cost that could undermine the retirement plan. And to know what state it is in today, all eyes will turn to the annual report of the Retirement Orientation Council (Cor), which assesses the financial health of the pension plan. Published this Thursday, June 13, its results often serve as justification for reforming the retirement system.