Jean-Luc Melenchon, the hard-left French presidential hopeful, will pledge to raise the minimum wage and restore the country’s retirement age to 60 when he launches his 2027 election programme on Saturday.
Und ganz nebenbei ist er ein putin-agent, der den nato austritt will, Ukraine verabscheut, und gegen Deutschland wettert.
Putin kann nicht früh genug ableben
“Hard-left” candidate promising the bare minimum to stop the riots and keep the system from cannibalising its own foundations for a time.
You know, the kind of stuff you might naively expect from centrists. Without being prompted by protests.
Retired French people now have higher incomes than working people. France already has near the lowest retirement age in Europe. It’s 70 for me in Denmark and it frequently gets later as medical technology and expected lifespans are projected to increase.
For context, France faces a severe and worsening structural debt problem. Public debt recently reached €3.6 trillion (119% of GDP), compared to 60% in 2000 and 98% in 2019. It’s getting much worse, very fast. They recorded a €152 billion deficit (5.1% of GDP) in 2025, while government expenditure consumed 57.3% of GDP. This is spooking the bond markets, so the cost of financing is skyrocketing. A 10-year French bond yields reached 4.76% a few days ago. Annual public-sector interest costs are projected to rise from €79.2 billion in 2026 to €91.2 billion in 2027.
Maybe they could survive this with massive and immediate spending cuts but they also have a demographic crisis. 22.2% of French residents are now 65 or older, versus 16.4% in 2006, while fertility has fallen to just 1.56 children per woman, its lowest level since the First World War. This aging population increases pension and healthcare pressures relative to the working-age population. Lowering retirement to 60 is basically a direct promise to cause runaway inflation and a debt crisis, culminating in a bailout by the IMF and Greek-level austerity measures.
I’m not making any of this up. All of this is publically reported.
France had a chance to be moderate on finances but they fucked it up so badly over so many decades that there is no moderate path anymore. I suspect they’re going to drive the car off the cliff and complain when they’re forced to cut spending under threat of the entire nation collapsing. Surprisingly, things worked out pretty well for Greece, so maybe that’s not the end of the world.
Retirement is very unequal. Some barely make it, others can afford multiples trips per years.
Personally, I just want to be able to retire before my heart decide it had enough.
I’m right there with you. I’ve been on the FIRE path for about a decade. I’m close to being able to retire in my late 30s. It’s been hard though, especially in Denmark. I’ve made a lot of sacrifices, working long hours in jobs I hated. I drive an old car, take modest vacations, and buy second hand stuff. For me the freedom of financial security feels better than any nice car, any nice vacation, or any nice clothes. I want to be able to spend my days reading books, listening to music, and hiking.
The hard left bit is stopping assistance to Ukraine. The hard left really loves Russia, the epitome of equality.
The only people that i distrust are real estate agents, horny frat boys and politicians.
Tldr: France is fucked no matter who wins the 2027 election.
For everyone with “Generational conflict” placards at the back of the room:
Pensioners and children (both don’t work) don’t eat bank notes. Working people’s labour creates the food they eat, the buildings they sleep in, the healthcare and education they receive. Today theres significantly fewer working people doing that labour relative to non-working people compared to 40, 50 or 70 years ago. Yet their labour appears to still be almost enough to take care of the pensioners, the children and the metastasizing 1%. How could this be? Why hasn’t the standard of living utterly collapsed for any of these groups? Why are the 1% living better than ever? It’s due to productivity gains. It takes fewer farmers along with machines to produce the same food as 70 years ago. It takes fewer tool and die makers to create the tooling for manufacturing any physical product. It takes fewer people to create the ssme number of school books. Build housing, etc. We need less working people labour to create the same stuff that we used to make 70 years ago. Conversely we can make more stuff with the same labour. This is why we can still support all three non-working groups while having fewer working people relative to non-working people than 70 years ago. And we’re not even done yet - there’s plenty more productivity that can be gained if we need it. There’s no inherent impossibility. There is however one of those groups whose consumption has been rising dramatically, and it’s not the pensioners or the children. The distribution of working people’s labour is a choice. Children will become working people, and then at some point they’ll become non-working pensioners. So there’s inherent solidarity between children and old people. The 1% on the other hand…
Generational conflict placard holder here.
And all the productivity gains are based on the abundance of cheap fossil energy. We tell ourselves its based on our ingenuity but thats an obvious lie. Or since it is France also the availability of cheap Uranium. The use of which has no negative consequences and will be available forever. Oh wait…
But lets make sure the coming generations have to feed our lazy asses from the age of 60 onward as a supplemental “fuck you”
And all the productivity gains are based on the abundance of cheap fossil energy.
And cheap Chinese components that workers in the West just have to stick together.
and let the US take care of our defense (although this applies to the rest of europe, not france).
uranium…will be available forever
I’m not trying to argue the broader point, but as to uranium…there’s a lot of uranium out there.
First of all, you only go hunting for uranium when you need more. There’s probably quite a bit more than is in known reserves. But let’s even set that aside.
There is a lot of uranium dissolved in seawater. We don’t currently extract it from seawater, because it’s cheaper to mine it. But we could. And the estimates I’ve seen are that if we did so, we could probably get the cost to about twice that of mining it. That’s an increase, but it’s not a big deal, because the fuel cost isn’t very significant when it comes to nuclear power.
And there are tens of thousand years of uranium, at current electricity use levels, in seawater. As you extract it, the cost of extraction in the (now more dilute) seawater is going to rise, but I can’t imagine that it’d be any higher than a linear increase at most. So once we’ve extracted half of it, our costs maybe at most double. That’s a long ways down the road.
With nuclear power, the constraint isn’t really availability of uranium. It’s the cost of constructing the plant (which, because nuclear plants last a long time, depends a lot on the finance cost, what interest rates a lender would currently demand to lend to someone at the moment).
The known reserves will be gone in ~50 years (at the current rate of usage, which is only 4.3% of the worlds primary energy consumption, if we replace the 75% fossil fuels with nuclear then “poof its gone” ). There will be more but it will get increasingly more difficult to extract it. Extracting Uranium from seawater is still in its laboratory phase and its far from clear it can be done economically. The long term disposal of nuclear waste is still largely unsolved.
We should only retire at 60 after we figured it all out, shouldn’t we?
I mean, it’s both. The productivity gain in farming comes from the inventions of modern tractors, tractor equipment, chemicals, etc. So there’s def ingenuity involved as it’s not trivial to invent those. But of course that steel they’re made of doesn’t come from thin air, neither does the diesel to run them. That’s your basic truth that all commodities come from natural resources transformed by human labour. In it most basic form productivity enhancing tech can increase our ability to transform more natural resources with less labour. I think that’s what your getting at. But that’s not the limit of it. It can and has increased the efficiency of what we get from the same resources. Coal plants today are much more efficient than they used to be a century ago. Typical solar panels today are in the 20-30% efficiency range. They used to be less than half that two decades ago. Neither of those mean we can make unlimited solar or burn infinite coal. But we’re talking a factor of 2 in energy production from the same resourcea that make up a solar panel. If productivity can give us these kinds of natural resource savings in additon to labour savings, I think it’s worth asking where are those savings going. Do they go to children, pensioners, or the 1%. And if it turns out that most of those gains aren’t with with the 99%, we ought to change that, before throwing children or pensioners under the bus. When we get those gains shared between both those classes, if there still isn’t enough, and if we’re stil hurling towards environmental extinction, then we should consider who gets thrown under the bus. And the final crucial bit - if we throw the pensioners under bus today, while leaving the 1% holding the power to overconsume what we produce, there’s little guarantee that what we took from the pensioners would reach the children. Looking at history, the most likely outcome is the 1% is gonna scoop that up too. That’s my thoughts on the matter. 😊
Youth is violently protesting, hard-left candidate restores retirement at 60.
Melenchon, 75, is viewed as the strongest…
Seriously though, a strong pension system lets people do other things after their years of paid work, which allows there to be space for young people to enter the workforce and bring their new ideas and energy, while allowing them to become established.
Seriously though, there are not enough young people for the masses of pensioners we get.
Not enough for what?
I’m sure if we are creative we will find a way to add more money to the system (i.e. not just funding via the current contribution system)
spoiler
Take money from the rich
The rich don’t own nearly enough. The retired people own most of the wealth in most western countries. Cap wealth at a million euros, not a billion, if you want to fix things.
Can you help me understand how you came to this conclusion (retired own more wealth than the rich)?
Pensioners and children (both don’t work) don’t eat bank notes. Working people’s labour creates the food they eat, the buildings they sleep in, the healthcare and education they receive. Today theres significantly fewer working people doing that labour relative to non-working people compared to 50 years ago. Yet their labour appears to still be almost enough to take care of the pensioners, the children and the metastasizing 1%. How could this be? Why hasn’t the standard of living utterly collapsed for any of these groups? Why are the 1% living better than ever? It’s due to productivity gains. It takes fewer farmers along with machines to produce the same food as 70 years ago. It takes fewer tool and die makers to create the tooling for manufacturing any physical product. It takes fewer people to create the ssme number of school books. Build housing, etc. We need less working people labour to create the same stuff that we used to make 70 years ago. Conversely we can make more stuff with the same labour. This is why we can still support all three non-working groups while having fewer working people relative to non-working people than 70 years ago. There’s no inherent impossibility. There is however one of those groups whose consumption has been rising dramatically, and it’s not the pensioners or the children. The distribution of working people’s labour is a choice. Children will become working people, and then at some point they’ll become non-working pensioners. So there’s inherent solidarity between children and old people.
Not that i don’t support those plans, but will he pay for them by selling France and Europe to Putin?
You support that plans even after you concluded that i is not possible to pay for without selling France and Europe to Putin?EDIT: forget what i said. I did read too much into this. You did not say that its only possible by selling France and Europe to Putin.
Taxing the elite properly, and preventing flight of both those oligarchs and their capital, seems unrealistic to you?
Melenchon had his chance and blew it, several times already. He’s incapable of being popular. He will hand it to fascists. The fascists certainly helped keep him in leadership so they could win in truth.
