With her proposal to link the statutory retirement age to life expectancy and thus increase it, the economist Veronika Grimm has met with restrained reactions. The CDU general secretary, Carsten Linnemann, told the newspapers of the Funke media group: “Politics need the courage to come up with differentiated solutions. You can’t increase the retirement age across the board.”
There would be people who could work longer with increasing life expectancy. “But there are also many who can no longer do it at the age of 60 for physical reasons – whether in care or in the trades,” said the Union politician.
Grimm sees it as necessary to further raise the statutory retirement age. “The standard retirement age should be linked to life expectancy,” she told the Funke newspapers at the weekend. The member of the Economic Expert Council specified what this step could look like. “The statutory retirement age will be raised to 67 by 2031. But it can’t stay that way. The future formula could be: If life expectancy increases by one year, two thirds of the additional year would go to gainful employment and one third to retirement.” , according to Grimm. However, she emphasized that there must be exceptions in the case of health impairments.
FDP: “At most with longer ones transition periods”
The labor market policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group, Pascal Kober, was also cautious about this proposal: “Increasing the retirement age can only be considered with longer transition periods, because people plan their retirement phase for the long term,” he told the Funke newspapers. “Politics must be reliable in relation to long-term life plans.” But voluntary work beyond the age limit must become more attractive and less bureaucratic, Kober demanded. “The Greens and SPD must give up their blockade here and work with us to find pragmatic solutions.”
Bremen’s Mayor Andreas Bovenschulte criticized the initiative on the short message service X as “deeply unjust”: “Well-paid business practices demand a higher retirement age because ‘we’ are living longer and longer – and fail to recognize that the already large gap between rich and poor in life expectancy in has continued to grow in recent decades,” writes the SPD politician. “Automatically linking the retirement age to the increase in average life expectancy would therefore be deeply unfair.”
Scholz: “Five decades of work – that’s enough”
On Thursday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at a citizens’ dialogue in Erfurt that because of the growing population and the number of employees, it was not necessary to raise the retirement age beyond 67 years. “Anyone who leaves school at the age of 17 has five decades of work ahead of them. I think that’s enough.” If someone wants to work longer, he should be able to do so – “but not because he has to, but because he or she can”.
Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil also agreed with this attitude: “That is an absolutely reliable statement,” said the SPD politician of the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”. Due to the strong economic development, the situation of the pension systems has “developed much more positively than one would have thought ten years ago. The system works”.
