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French senate blocks suspension of pension reform
France’s Senate has voted to strike down a provision in the 2026 Social Security Financing Bill that sought to temporarily halt the government’s contentious pension reform. The measure would have pushed the planned rise in the retirement age to January 2028, but lawmakers rejected the suspension during a late-night session on Tuesday.
Senators decided to remove Article 45, which proposed freezing the legal retirement age at 62 years and nine months while also pausing the planned extension of contribution requirements. According to national media, 190 senators opposed the suspension, while 108 voted to keep it.
Centrist Senator Olivier Henno, who co-authored an amendment eliminating the delay, argued that maintaining the reform was necessary to prevent “financial and regulatory drift” within France’s social security system. Independent Senator Emmanuel Capus strongly criticized the proposed suspension, calling it “one of the most misguided political decisions in recent decades” and comparing it to the 1981 lowering of the retirement age to 60.
The delay was originally inserted into the bill by the National Assembly as part of a political compromise offered by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to the Socialist Party. The proposal would have postponed both the increase in retirement age and the extension of contribution periods until January 1, 2028.
President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly emphasized that the measure constituted a postponement — not a reversal — of the reform, which gradually raises the legal retirement age to 64 for citizens born in 1968 and later. The suspension would have shifted that threshold to the 1969 birth cohort and delayed the requirement of 172 quarters for a full pension from the 1965 to the 1966 generation.
The Senate is expected to vote formally on the bill on Wednesday afternoon before it heads to a joint committee of senators and deputies later that day. The committee will attempt to reach a compromise before the December 12 deadline, though persistent disagreements between Socialists and Republicans make an agreement appear unlikely.
Should the committee fail to find common ground, the bill will return to the National Assembly, where left-wing lawmakers may attempt once again to restore the suspension.
