France : Constitutional Council’s decision on 14 April 2023

The Constitutional Council’s decision on 14 April 2023 found in favour of the government, which went ahead and, on 15 April, published amending finance law no. 2023-270 of 14 April 2023 for the social security system for 2023, reforming the pension system, despite unanimous opposition from the trade unions. The statutory retirement age has been raised from 62 to 64. The Constitutional Council rejected six measures, including “the seniors index”, which was intended to encourage companies to take steps to keep older employees in work, and the creation of a specific contract of employment for older workers. This reform has been unanimously denounced by the trade unions and adopted without the support of the National Assembly, while 80% of the working population have said they are against it. The outcome embodies a malfunction of social democracy, in which social partners are marginalised by a concentration of powers within the person of the French President. As regards the way in which this reform was implemented, for Dominique Rousseau, who is a professor of constitutional law, the Constitutional Council’s decision is an acknowledgement “that ministers produced ‘wrong estimates’ at the debates in Parliament, several procedures were used ‘cumulatively’ in order to speed up the process of passing the law and the combined use of the procedures implemented was ‘unusual in nature’ (see Le Monde). As Guillaume Duval explains in Social Europe, this reform “will have widened the gap between the people and the elites and increased again the potential for popular resentment against the system”. “Forcing those who lose out in the process of globalisation to work for longer will stir up social unrest that will be exploited by” the far right, warns political scientist Bruno Palier in Le Monde. This victory for the presidential camp merely heralds future defeats. The unions [intersyndicale] were invited to meet the President on 18 April, but declined to take part in any meeting before the demonstrations scheduled for 1 May.