“By not seeing itself age, France risks seeing its social system collapse” | EUROtoday

“France is a country of old people, which considers itself a country of young people. » The formula of Maxime Sbaihi, the strategic director of Club Landoy, a center for reflection on demography, summarizes the French unthinking on one of the country’s biggest issues for the decades to come. Faced with a predictable demographic shock, our leaders practiced burying their heads in the sand.

As is often the case, France preferred to idealize itself instead of looking in the mirror: we had the most productive employees, the best social model, debt repayment was not a subject and we had more children than the others. Enough to look to the future with confidence and put angry subjects under the rug.

The country did not want to see that it was not immune to the demographic winter, but that, simply, the phenomenon would be delayed in time. From this point of view, the year 2025 constitutes a tipping point. For the first time since 1944, the number of deaths should exceed that of births – the latter may never have been so low in eighty years – while, in the meantime, the population has increased by thirty million inhabitants. Finally, there are now more people over 60 than under 20. Rather than fantasizing about the “great replacement”, some would do higher to fret in regards to the nice growing old.

Waking up is all of the harder the later it’s. France has achieved the feat of debating pension reform for six years, with out with the ability to agree on the demographic proof that imposes itself on the nation. While all our neighbors had been adapting, we struggled with poorly born, poorly thought out, poorly voted texts which had the only results of dampening the controversy on the topic for the following presidential election. “Which coverage will carry earlier than 2027, the only concept of ​​elevating the authorized age if he needs to win the election? » The reply is within the query requested by the final secretary of the CFDT, Marylise Léon, in Les Echos : most likely nobody.

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