Macron has slowly morphed into his worst caricatures

French voters did not re-elect Emmanuel Macron last year with a nearly 60 per cent majority for his social, economic, and political vision. He was in large part re-elected in spite of them.

- BORZOU DARAGAHI

Voters re-elected him in a landslide because the alternative was Marine Le Pen, a Kremlin-backed far-right ideological descendant of Nazi collaborators. As he acknowledged during his victory speech during a rare moment of humility, a number of French people voted for him "not to support my ideas, but to stop the ideas of the far right".

At that moment, a nation emerging from the trauma of the Covid pandemic and the shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine did not grant him the authority to make any bold moves, as shown by his loss of a parliamentary majority two months later. French voters certainly did not give him an explicit mandate to revamp France's pensions programme by increasing the age of retirement, plunging the country into chaos, and prompting crippling waves of public strikes and street violence.

France needs pension reform. But Macron is the wrong guy implementing the wrong package with the wrong message at the wrong time. Streamlining public finances is worthwhile. But it must not be done in a way that places almost all the burdens on the poor and middle class.

Like many western nations, France's demographics have been shifting for decades. An increasingly agile, ageing population is living longer off of retirement benefits payments bankrolled by dwindling pools of younger workers.

At 62, France's retirement age is one of the earliest in the western world, and many economists agree that it is economically unsustainable. Paris wants to lower France's pension expenditures of nearly 15 per cent of GDP to bring them more in line with continental standards of around 11.5 per cent.

Macron's proposal to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 is reasonable, and includes many provisions to dampen the impact on the infirm, disabled and those employed in physically challenging public sector positions.