The pension orientation council in the sights of the government

Admissions of failure are rare enough to be underlined. “If there is one thing that I regret, it is that we have not succeeded in sharing the need to make this reform [of pensions]”, recognized Emmanuel Macron, on March 22, during his interview. televised on the 1 p.m. newscasts of TF1 and France 2. The regrets of the President of the Republic did not escape the government, which immediately draws the consequences of this failure behind the scenes. And the culprit is all found. This is the famous COR, the retirement guidance council.

Élisabeth Borne fulminates behind the scenes against the institution, which is certainly independent but nevertheless remains institutionally placed under the thumb of the Prime Minister. According to her, the multiplication of the assumptions of the COR made the future of the pension system unreadable at the very moment when the government declared it in danger to justify its reform. “Everyone gets the scenario they want, it has blurred the tracks”, confided Élisabeth Borne to our colleagues from France Info.

Even more than the functioning of the COR, it was the exit of its president Pierre-Louis Bras, on January 19, which left a bitter taste in the presidential majority. Before the deputies of the Finance Committee and the Social Affairs Committee, the economist declared that “pension expenditure is not skidding” and even that “they are relatively under control”. A statement immediately picked up and hammered home by opponents of the pension reform, who incidentally gloss over the thoughts that day of the same Pierre-Louis Bras on the deficit balance of the pension system in the coming years.

The statement, shared repeatedly on social networks, is a turning point in the battle of public opinion between the government and opponents of its reform last January. “He should have made a complete comment and not let his remarks be cut up, recently regretted the deputy and former minister Éric Woerth with Le Figaro. When he speaks on such a sensitive subject, he must carefully measure what he is saying. It is not the simple word of an academic in a symposium.

Could the Pensions Orientation Council, born from the ashes of the failed reform of the Juppé government, become the collateral victim of the failure of the Borne government to convince the French? The track does not seem ruled out. The Prime Minister's entourage suggests that Elisabeth Borne is thinking about another way to take an objective and clear look at the state of the pension system. “We will have to wonder about a place where we can come to an agreement on the diagnosis. Obviously, it will not be the Pensions Orientation Council, ”explains Matignon in the columns of L'Opinion.

The threats that the government poses to the pensions orientation council have not failed to react. The economist Michael Zemmour, figurehead of the opposition to the pension reform, considered “shameful” the projection of the government against the COR. "The reform has been widely rejected, not because it has not been understood, but because it has been better and better, in its outlines, and in the arbitrations which underlie it, even if the details can be complex”, he mocks in a tweet.