France’s Senate removes key provision of 2026 Financing Bill

(MENAFN) France’s Senate has rejected a key measure in the 2026 Social Security Financing Bill that would have temporarily halted the government’s pension reform until January 2028. In a late-night session on Tuesday, senators voted to remove Article 45, which sought to freeze the legal retirement age at 62 years and 9 months and pause the planned increase in required contribution periods.

According to a news agency, 190 senators voted in favor of keeping the pension reform in place, while 108 supported the suspension. Centrist Senator Olivier Henno, who introduced one of the amendments to eliminate the freeze, said he would not endorse what he described as “a normative and financial drift” that ran counter to the responsibility needed to manage France’s social budget.

Independent Senator Emmanuel Capus offered an even stronger rebuke, calling the suspension “one of the worst political decisions in recent decades.” He argued that such a move would recall the contentious 1981 decision that lowered the retirement age to 60.

The suspension itself had been added in the National Assembly as part of a political compromise engineered by Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu to win support from the Socialist Party, granting a pause on both the retirement age and contribution requirements until Jan. 1, 2028. President Emmanuel Macron, however, had maintained that the measure represented only a “delay,” not an abandonment of the reform.

Under the existing reform schedule, the retirement age is set to gradually rise to 64 for those born in 1968 and afterward. If the delay were enacted, the shift to 64 would apply instead to people born in 1969. Likewise, the requirement of 172 quarters for a full pension would be postponed from the 1965 generation to those born in 1966.

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