French PM says more changes would derail pension reform

PARIS (Reuters) - French Prime Minister Francois Fillon ruled out Thursday offering more concessions to trade unions on a planned pension reform, saying this would derail efforts to balance a system costing billions of euros each year.

France's powerful trade unions, buoyed by a massive turnout for a nationwide strike that disrupted transport and schooling Tuesday, have announced a fresh protest for September 23 in a bid to turn up the heat on conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy.

His government, which trails the Socialist opposition in the polls with less than two years until 2012 presidential elections, has already offered some concessions to workers performing arduous jobs or who started work young.

But it has refused to budge on the heart of the reform -- a rise in the minimum retirement age to 62 from 60 and in the full pensionable age to 67 from 65, which it says is crucial to avert running up enormous deficits as the French population ages.

"I think that today conceding anything else would mean not being able to assure the funding of pensions," Fillon told France 2 television, when asked if the government was willing to ditch plans to increase the full retirement age.

Abandoning this measure would leave France needing another 6 billion euros a year to fund the pensions system, he said.

"BE REALISTIC"

With other European countries raising the retirement age as high as 68, Fillon said, the French could not expect to keep the same pensionable age while their life expectancy increased and the number of pensioners steadily rose.

"I completely understand...the fact that the French do not approve of working longer but at the same time I ask them to be realistic and look at what is happening around them," he said. "Our proposal is very reasonable in a European context."

Analysts have said they see little chance of Sarkozy, who pledged to reform France as he took power in 2007, backing down on a bill that many consider the flagship reform of a five-year term which ends in early 2012.

The reform is an essential part of Sarkozy's commitment to cut France's budget deficit to the EU ceiling of 3 percent of GDP by 2013, from a forecast 8 percent this year.

After Tuesday's protest, which brought more than 1 million marchers onto the streets according to an official count and up to 2.7 million according to unions, Sarkozy said the pension reform bill could be tweaked to soften the impact on people who started work very young or had particularly arduous jobs.

But Bernard Thibault, leader of the large CGT union federation, threatened the government with the prospect of rolling strikes unless it rethinks the reform completely.

"The more intransigence that exists, the more the idea of rollover strikes will gain ground in people's minds," he told Le Monde newspaper Thursday. "We are not going to give in."

The Socialist party, which has joined with unions in opposing the reform, plans to re-establish the right to retire at 60 if it wins the 2012 elections, former presidential candidate Segolene Royal told France 2.

(Reporting by Daniel Flynn and Yves Clarisse; Editing by Brian Love and Mark Heinrich)

WhatsAppFacebookTwitterLinkedinBeloudBluesky