In the dispute over the "pension at 63," Union faction leader Thorsten Frei has rejected calls for changes to the pension reform. He said he saw no room for negotiation on the planned abolition of the accrual-free pension for those with particularly long insurance records, telling broadcaster Welt that otherwise the entire pension reform could fail. Saxony-Anhalt's State Premier Sven Schulze (CDU) stressed on Tuesday that the calls for changes from eastern Germany were not about "calling the pension reform as a whole into question."
Frei referred to the preparatory work carried out by the pension commission on the reform. He said he did not see "that we should be smarter than the scientists and politicians who worked on the old-age security commission." The commission had proposed abolishing the accrual-free pension for those with particularly long insurance records. Several state premiers from the CDU and SPD have since spoken out against this, with fierce criticism coming above all from eastern Germany.
Frei told Welt he was "a little" surprised that eastern German CDU state premiers had come out against ending the "pension at 63." He said there was actually broad agreement within the parliamentary group and the party "that we need to adopt the proposals of the old-age security commission, at least in their basic outlines, in full."
Frei said he hoped to still be able to change the minds of the critical state leaders once the draft bill from the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs is available. "And even if one may feel a bit uneasy about individual issues, I believe every responsible politician ultimately has to take an overall view of the measures," the CDU politician said. "And then, when in doubt, you sometimes also have to go along with something you might not want 100 percent."
Sachsen-Anhalt's State Premier Sven Schulze (CDU) meanwhile spelled out in more detail the demands for changes coming from eastern Germany. "It is not about calling the pension reform as a whole into question," he told newspapers of the Funke media group. "What matters to us is that the different career paths and life realities in eastern Germany are taken into account in the further deliberations."
Schulze and the two other CDU state premiers in eastern Germany, Michael Kretschmer (Saxony) and Mario Voigt (Thuringia), had jointly called for the accrual-free pension after 45 years of contributions to be retained after all. They argued that many people in eastern Germany are reliant solely on the statutory pension in old age. The SPD state premiers of Saarland and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Anke Rehlinger and Manuela Schwesig, have also since rejected the abolition of the "pension at 63."
The deputy chair of the pension commission, Pascal Reddig (CDU), warned, however, against pulling individual building blocks out of the overall reform. "The accrual-free early pension after 45 years of contributions costs the solidarity community a double-digit billion-euro sum every year and fails to achieve its original goal of enabling people in physically demanding jobs to retire earlier," he told the Funke newspapers (Tuesday editions).
For that reason, he said, the commission had recommended replacing it with a targeted protective pension for people whose health has been impaired. "If, on the other hand, we now pull the abolition of the 'pension at 63' out of the overall package, the whole house of the pension reform could collapse," Reddig warned. The measures proposed by the commission, he said, "interact with one another and are only financeable in the long term as a balanced overall package."
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