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JANUARY 26, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

Who Knew? Revoking Long-Established Rights (This Time in France) Proves
Unpopular

Macron's bid to raise retirement age yields huge backlash. Have our
own Republicans even noticed?

French President Emmanuel Macron is going through his own

**Dobbs** decision backlash.

In an effort to reduce his nation's pension costs and presumably make
its economy more competitive, he's proposed to raise the retirement
age from 62 to 64.

He's encountered a couple of problems along the way. First, France's
public pension system is a notable success, yielding one of the lowest
elderly poverty rates on the planet. Second, the French people have now
been making life plans premised on retirement at 62 for more than a
dozen years. Upping that by two years takes away a fundamental assurance
on which the French have depended.

Which is why a million Parisians took to the streets last week in
protest. Which is why a recent poll showed that 68 percent of Macron's
compatriots oppose raising the age.

Which is why Macron is stumbling down the same path that our own
Republicans have been taking in revoking

**Roe v. Wade** and seeking to outlaw abortion. People don't usually
respond gently to the imposed withdrawal of what they've long taken to
be their fundamental rights.

Actually, the French have been down this road before. In 2010,
Macron's fellow conservative and presidential predecessor Nicolas
Sarkozy managed to persuade parliament
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to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, which, then as now, provoked
a massive outburst of popular rage.

The French

**enragés** have history on their side. As CUNY history professor David
Troyansky has documented
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France began the selective provision of old-age pensions even before the
1789 revolution, and they kicked in at age 60. Straight through the
revolution, the reign of Napoleon, the return of the Bourbons, and all
the subsequent regimes of the 19th and 20th centuries, those pensions,
gradually extended to the entire 60-plus population, remained intact.

So what Macron is proposing to do is to alter a program that's both
highly successful and highly popular, and well established (to put it
mildly) as a fundamental right of the French people. As both the
right-wing nationalists of the Le Pen movement and the multiple
varieties of French socialists oppose this measure, Macron may have a
harder time enacting his work-longer proposal than Sarkozy had enacting
his.

If there's a lesson here for the congressional Republicans who are
calling for raising the age of eligibility for Social Security and
Medicare, they don't seem to be taking it. Then again, their
continuing push to ban and restrict abortions already demonstrates an
imperviousness to popular will-in particular, to the hard fact that
people, as such, usually don't take well to having long-established
fundamental rights stripped away from them, as Emmanuel Macron is now
learning the hard way.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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