All his biographers have revealed it in great detail, Emmanuel Macron made his career under the protective wing of elders with silver temples. A priori impossible to suspect him of a form of rejection of those who left the shores of youth. And yet, there is a kind of unease, like a feeling of abandonment among the elders, which simmers quietly in all the debates around pension reform. Where does this misunderstanding between the head of state and the aging people come from? From a vice of departure from the official discourse, from a diffuse feeling that retirees are now only assisted, big privileged people paid to do nothing, thus becoming burdens for the whole nation. Dead weights?
The expression is painful, but it roughly corresponds to the original discourse of the macronist planet, this new world of leaping forties, who wanted to make the skin of the baby boomers. A thinly masked generational war? Appearance only. Because, formidable paradox, the president and his ministers, including that of Labor, Olivier Dussopt, hammer on all the roofs that they will never attack the pensions of the retirees. Don’t touch the wallets of grandfathers and grandmothers, these French people with the highest purchasing power in Europe. With the exception of Marc Ferracci, Renaissance deputy for French nationals abroad, specialist in labor law, the closest friend of Emmanuel Macron, who dares to mention, still quietly, with the left-wing think tank, Terra Nova, the need for a “fair sharing of the effort between the generations”. Others go further, even evoking the excessive power of an all-powerful “gerontocracy”, which would influence the head of state. However, since the beginning of the debates, the communication of power skates briskly and makes you dizzy.
Pension reform: seniors still pushed out
How many Deputies En Marche, and still today, on television sets, tangle their brushes by presenting the reform as progressive when they still considered these inactive people, at the start of the first five-year term, as big privileged people living on the backs of young workers. This vision, falling from an Excel spreadsheet, has imbued public opinion with unprecedented brutality. Result: the controversies over the legal age of departure of future retirees from the “cemetery of lazy people” has taken on serious anxiety-provoking proportions. For many, the old would be doomed to become mere citizens on the spur of the moment, contributing nothing to the nation.
Is the line a little thicker? Without a doubt. But it reveals the missing link in the communication of this beleaguered government, that of a defense of the tremendous social usefulness of seniors, of their involvement in the associative fabric, of the hours of childcare for grandchildren, of the capital role of transmission of knowledge and experience. Here, curiously, the government has no say. We hear here and there a few whispers about the economic weight, in the productive sense of the term, of this category of the population, highly active in the world of leisure, the one that delights tourist offices, consuming travel, pastries , French films in cinemas, and therefore providing work for the youngest. We could multiply the examples of the role of job providers for seniors, and not only in nursing homes.
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How can we talk about a pension reform without mentioning the major role of the beneficiaries of these pensions in terms of social cohesion, too? This is undoubtedly what explains the very real restraint of the president on the purchasing power of seniors, overprotected, and, at the same time, neglected. Wouldn’t it have been clearer to praise their social role while asking them for a small share in the national effort? Or even fairer? Here again, the macronists locked themselves in a posture of a chartered accountant, without a long-term vision of life after work. This president, probably struck by the Peter Pan syndrome, would not have thought of it?
Pension reform: the unique Borne-Ciotti axis
