🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - Social support

29 October 2023 - Complimentary pensions negotiations begin, the French government steps up support after riots, and Castaner takes a secret trip to China

The Weekly Dispatch is your weekly update on major events in French and European politics, published on Sundays to give you the ideal summary of current affairs.

The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy reading this, like, subscribe, share it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

This week

• 💰Complimentary pensions negotiations begin

• 🏛️Government steps up support after riots

• 🇨🇳Castaner’s secret trips to China

💰Complimentary pensions negotiations begin

Photo by Ibrahim Boran on Unsplash

This week saw a big piece of news that will matter to employees in France, as the government and social partners will begin negotiations to plug some holes in the Agirc-Arrco, the private supplementary pension fund.

To begin with, the government had announced that it would impose financial contributions to this pension fund in order to reinforce the means of the system. However, this ‘threat’ was able to be removed from the table under one condition:

That employers and employee organisations would reopen discussions regarding the distribution system, and potential co-financing systems for smaller pensions.

And this seems to have been taken up by the social partners, who have announced that they will begin negotiatiations to find financial solution that will shore up the Agirc-Arrco system.

The French pension system has been strengthened since the pension reform on April 14, with the Agirc-Arrco budget expected to increase by €400 million in 2024 alone, and €1.2 billion by 2026. At least according to Matignon.

It’s for this reason that the government wanted to become more muscular in its approach to pensions, with a proposal being touted to use this “windfall” from the pension reform to try to rebalance the system by injecting money where needed.

However, this idea has been put to the side for the time being.

Returning to the negotiations, the main question now is who will participate in these discussions.

To begin with, the CFDT, CFE-CGC, and the CFTC are all keen to get started and to start the process as early as November. Force Ouvrière have also stated they will be involved, but are however pushing for a later start, sometime in January.

The MEDEF are also planning to be involved for obvious reasons, but have stated that they would only support the participation and invite those who signed an ANI statement on October 5. Naturally, this caused a fight with two other employers movements, the CPME and the U2P, who had disagreed with the statement itself.

🏛️Government steps up support after riots

Photo by Rob Potvin on Unsplash

Moving on to a (slightly) more local topic: Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne announced that the French state will provide help to municipalities in the wake of the riots in June and July.

One big victory that was touted is that 60% of the public buildings that had been partially or totally destroyed have already been restored, after the government added a promise of €100 million to the reimbursements offered by insurance.

However, the big issue is that a lot of the cities and towns that were effected don’t want the money, even if they will happily use it to rebuild their destroyed buildings. What they want is answers to the bigger societal question that led to this.

There’s a big resurrection of the topic of responsibilising the parents of the delinquents who engage in violent acts, potential supervision acts, and additional “tools” to help communities to manage these issues.

There’s also a serious discussion regarding police numbers, with the reduction in police officers across municipalities struggling to be reversed, even with the recent announcement of new units of Gendarmes across the country.

However, in the short term, only a few requests have been made. One idea promoted by Elisabeth Borne this Friday was for prefects to avoid allocating housing spots in priority neighbourhood to precarious citizens in France.

While this may seem exclusionary, the idea behind this is a positive one: rather than concentrating people coming from difficult backgrounds all in one single area, it may be better to spread them out and to make sure that there aren’t concentrations of poverty of social difficulties in pockets across the country.

The hope is that this could lead to more diversity, encouraging more social mobility whilst maintaining support for those who need it. However, this has naturally been criticised by those on the left, who have criticised this plan as disadvantaging those in need.

To put this into context: DALO households, those who have a right to housing and who have priority in the allocation of social housing, increased by 35,000 in 2022, with 93,000 awaiting rehousing, a majority in the Paris region.

Alongside this, there will be ongoing testing operations starting in 2024, that will focus on uncovering discrimination targeting those in disadvantaged situations regarding housing, hiring, and access to loans. This is expected to target 500 companies per year.

🇨🇳Castaner’s secret trips to China

Photo by zhang kaiyv on Unsplash

Let’s finish up the week with a public interest story.

Christophe Castaner, the former interior minister who is close to President Emmanuel Macron, was found to have recently led a delegation of French parliamentarians and entrepreneurs to Beijing, Canton, and Shenzhen.

During this trip, he was leading this delegations in discussions related to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and participated in the Belt and Road forum that was organised in Beijing on October 17 and 18.

However, there’s a hitch: the French embassy in Beijin spoke to Le Monde and told them that there had only been on delegation, which was chaired by former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, under the mandate of the president. Not Castaner.

After a few days of discussions and investigation into it, it then came out that Castaner’s trip was a “private trip” that had been financed by the Chinese authorities, raising several alarms.

Not only this, but the former Interior Minister began giving rave reviews of the Chinese remark:

“The power of China which has transformed over the last twenty, thirty years also implies that we strengthen the links systematically, even systemically, with the authorities, Chinese companies but also the cultural world, the scientific world … It is essential for us … to ensure that we can find win-win paths in our economies.”

Naturally, with all of this, everybody began to ask what exactly Castaner was doing, and when asked, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to make any comment, aside from reiterating previously known information

“Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative was Jean-Pierre Raffarin and this is the only trip we took care of”

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below: