PARIS — French Prime Minister François Bayrou is refusing to admit defeat after his signature effort to tweak the country’s unpopular 2023 retirement reform appeared to collapse this week without a deal.
At a press conference on Thursday, Bayrou asserted that the trade unions and industry representatives who participated in his “conclave” on the reform had managed to agree to several compromises that his government plans to legislate in the fall. Those include a commitment to make the pension system financially sustainable by 2030; calculating pensions differently to avoid penalizing women on maternity leave; and making better provision for workers who have strenuous jobs.
“Daring to talk about failure while we have such a large number of essential agreements on the pension system doesn’t seem realistic to me,” Bayrou said.
Bayrou admitted that an agreement hadn’t yet been found on how to compensate workers who have physically demanding jobs or how to fully finance the proposed tweaks, but described those issues as “solvable.”
“The totality of decisions that have been the subject of at least implicit agreement are impressive,” he said.
Bayrou convened the pensions meeting at the beginning of his tenure in January hoping to find agreement on fixes to a law raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 that didn’t put the system further in the red.
After four months of closed-door talks failed to yield a deal, the center-left Socialist Party, which initially gave Bayrou time to see how the conclave played out, filed a motion of no confidence against the government.
Bayrou said he believed the threat from the Socialists was more of a muscle flex than a real sign of resistance.
“They needed to show a sign of opposition for internal reasons,” Bayrou said. “But I don’t believe that, on the substance, the Socialist Party, with its history, can disagree with this method.”
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