Paris (AFP)

The pension reform is "inevitable", ruled Saturday the president of Modem François Bayrou, who believes that it will be "at the heart of the presidential campaign", while Eric Woerth (LR) wants it to push back the retirement "fairly quickly at 64, and later at 65".

During the campaign, "everyone will come and say whether or not he is determined to take on this reform for one reason only, and that is that pensions continue to be paid," Mr. Bayrou said on BFMTV, even though he did not. is "not sure that the timing of an election campaign is the right" to bring up this explosive subject.

"If we go in the direction of dangling arms and lose interest in the subject, one day - perhaps soon - it is pensions that will be in question", warned Mr. Bayrou, head of one of the three pillars of parliamentary majority.

For Eric Woerth, LR chairman of the National Assembly's finance committee, "we must explain in a simple way, not arrogant or brutal, that we will have to continue to increase the retirement age, that it is not the first time nor perhaps the last "in order to guarantee" the return to balance "of the pension system.

In an interview with Liberation, the deputy of Oise "militates so that one goes quickly enough to 64 years, and later to 65 years" and to "put an end clearly, not over thirty years, to the special regimes for the new new entrants, redefine arduousness and make an effort on small pensions, by indexing the first 1,000 euros of pension on the evolution of the standard of living ".

Traveling in the Lot on Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron fueled speculation on the relaunch of this explosive site by reaffirming that he will have to make "difficult" decisions so that the last year of the five-year term is "useful". On the pension issue, he stressed that "nothing is excluded", but that the reform suspended at the start of the health crisis could not be "resumed as it is".

The health crisis has left public finances "extraordinarily disrupted", with "the largest public deficit in decades" and a "spending atmosphere, that is to say that it goes far beyond emergency spending ", estimates Mr. Woerth, for whom the pension system" is in deficit, of the order of 11 billion euros for compulsory schemes and 20 to 25 billion with complementary, even though we had balanced it " during Nicolas Sarkozy's five-year term (2007-2012).

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Emmanuel Macron must "measure whether he has the necessary political room" to carry out this reform in the last year of his mandate, believes the former Budget Minister who says he is ready to vote "a good pension reform".

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