France Senate rejects suspension of pension reform

(MENAFN) France’s Senate has blocked a significant amendment to the 2026 Social Security Financing Bill that would have delayed the contentious pension reform until January 2028, according to reports. In a public session on Tuesday, senators voted to remove Article 45, which had proposed freezing the legal retirement age at 62 years and 9 months and halting the planned extension of contribution periods.

A total of 190 senators supported keeping the reform in place, while 108 backed the suspension. Centrist Senator Olivier Henno, who proposed one of the amendments to scrap the freeze, stated he could not support measures that would “fuel a normative and financial drift contrary to the spirit of responsibility which must govern the management of our social accounts.”

Independent Senator Emmanuel Capus was even more critical, describing the suspension as “certainly the worst political decision of recent decades,” arguing that halting the reform would mirror the controversial decision to lower the retirement age to 60 in 1981.

The suspension had originally been proposed in the National Assembly as a political compromise by Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu to the Socialist Party, temporarily freezing both the legal retirement age and contribution requirements through January 1, 2028. President Emmanuel Macron, however, has consistently emphasized that the amendment represented only a “delay” and not a full halt to his signature pension reform.

Under the current plan, the legal retirement age is set to rise to 64 for those born in 1968 and later. With the previously proposed delay, this threshold would have shifted to 1969 births. Similarly, the requirement of 172 quarters for a full pension would have moved from the 1965 generation to those born in 1966.

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