“You can’t buy pension reform,” said a deputy finance minister. “It’s going to hit the nerve of what democracy is about.”
Pension reform also has a habit of bringing protesters onto the streets. In Brussels, police clashed with trade unions on Tuesday, who were demonstrating over austerity measures that include raising the age of retirement from 65 to 67 by 2030. Belgium got off lightly when compared to France, which witnessed months of protests in 2023 when President Emmanuel Macron raised the retirement age from 62 to 64.
Even then, France’s recently reinstated prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, announced Tuesday that he’d put Macron’s pensions reforms on ice to overcome a parliamentary crisis that’s made it impossible to pass a budget. Postponing the reforms could cost Paris up to €400 million next year at a time when the government tries to tighten its belt and reduce the country’s ballooning debt burden.
The Commission’s focus would stop short of setting retirement age or mandating monthly payouts to pensioners. Brussels’ reform plans instead home in on incentivizing citizens to save for retirement and encouraging companies to offer corporate pension plans to employees.
CSRs are part of an annual fiscal surveillance exercise that the Commission uses to coordinate economic policies across the bloc. These recommendations are negotiated with EU capitals in a bid to fix a country’s most pressing economic problems. The Commission doesn’t consider this coercion, just sound economics.
“If it’s on pensions, then so be it,” a second senior Commission official said.