Marine Le Pen wishes, in her program, to bring back the starting age to 60 for French people who started working before the age of 20.
In 2007, Jean-Marie Le Pen came out in favor of a legal retirement age of 65 and wanted to put an end to special schemes.
This totem of retirement at 60 has always tensed the liberal line of the National Rally.
“Retirement at 65, for certain professions, is inhuman”, judged Marine Le Pen, Wednesday on BFMTV, the presidential candidate advocating a partial return of the legal retirement age to 60.
At the National Rally, the 2022 version of the pension program is the opposite of the 2007 version. Jean-Marie Le Pen wanted to postpone retirement to 65 – like a certain Emmanuel Macron very recently – and put an end to special regimes .
The leader of the far-right party posed an ultimatum for the latter: either their inclusion in a single regime, or special funding outside public funds.
Why this big difference?
When she took the helm of the National Front in 2011, Marine Le Pen had two objectives.
"The first, explains Gilles Ivaldi, political scientist at Cevipof and specialist in radical right, is to rebalance the party's program, to get out of the themes of immigration, security which are, in his view, a little restrictive and, then, it is to have a fuller economic and social program.
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His proposal on pensions is “very clearly oriented to the left in the French political space, adds the political scientist.
We must integrate this change of direction into the social-populism of Marine Le Pen, into this desire to defend the little ones, the invisible”.
This is part of "a much broader strategy which is to pull the FN towards the economic left with redistribution measures", he continues, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity measures taken by the Fillon government.
“A strategic change”
Between 2012 and 2022, Marine Le Pen clarified her proposal.
It went from retirement at age 60 with 40 annual contributions for all to a planed reform in February: only those who worked before age 20 could benefit from this full pension.
A progressive system would be implemented for 20-25 year olds.
The current rules would remain (almost) unchanged for people who started working at the age of 25, after higher education for example.
The rights would be open from the age of 62, but to benefit from a full pension, it would be necessary to go up to 67 years with 42 annuities (compared to 43 for employees born after 1973 currently).
"It's a strategic change to keep its social roots while making it more acceptable to a more liberal clientele economically,
This proposal, "it's a social sham, denounces Pascal Debay, in charge of issues related to the far right at the CGT, who believes that such a promise would not be kept.
This is part of a strategy for recovering social themes that Marine Le Pen has implemented since 2012. Her retirement at 60 would apply to a minority of employees if she unfortunately comes to power.
This is not at all what the trade unions are proposing.
The CGT has regularly criticized the political “opportunism” of the National Front/Rassemblement and an unfunded pension proposal.
“A desire to go back to basics”
However, this totem of retirement at 60 has always tensed the liberal line of the RN.
In
Le Parisien
, a party official thus hoped in the fall of 2020 that "Marine Le Pen eases her foot a little on this subject".
"Basically, the position is not tenable and, strategically, it installs the idea that we would not be in phase with the economic issues," he added.
This division on pensions partly explains the defectors at Eric Zemmour, who defended him from retirement at 64 and the abolition of special plans.
“Among the liberalists of the FN, there is a desire to return to fundamentals: less State, less taxes, less bureaucracy, fewer civil servants, recalls the political scientist.
There has always been a tension and, in the end, Marine Le Pen's line prevailed, which caused the estrangement of Marion Maréchal, Nicolas Bay, Gilbert Collard who are more to the right on economic issues.
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"Two candidates who dynamited the left-right divide"
Before the President of the Republic entered the campaign and his divisive proposal on pensions, executives of the far-right party feared that the subject would become a burden for Marine Le Pen.
Like the exit of the euro in 2017.
The difficulty of combining these two lines has been in the background for ten years at the RN.
"In the second round, it's interesting, because we have two candidates who dynamited the left-right divide: Emmanuel Macron with the left and the right and Marine Le Pen on the neither left nor right, analyzes Gilles Ivaldi.
And they both face the challenge of bringing together voters with different sociologies and economic interests.
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Elections
Presidential election 2022
Marine Le Pen
Jean Marie Le Pen
Retirement
National Rally (RN)
Pension reform