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Organisation of the system, Jean-Luc Mélenchon

Funded share: No alternative to pay-as-you-go; funded pensions solve nothing

Direction of change: unchanged, compared with current law.

The lever. Role given to retirement savings invested on the markets, alongside pay-as-you-go, in which the contributions of those in work pay the pensions. Direction rule: ↑ larger funded share.

« D’abord, il n’y a pas d’alternative à la retraite par répartition. De grands esprits pensent que la capitalisation va les libérer de la structure démographique du pays : ils se trompent. »1

Translation by the editorsFirst of all, there is no alternative to the pay-as-you-go pension system. Great minds think that funded pensions will free them from the country's demographic structure: they are wrong.

Words of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Entretien avec La Tribune Dimanche, 10 May 2026. Position taken from public statements, not from a written programme.

Encoding

The position maintains current law: no parameter changes.

Costing

Announced by the candidate

not announced

The cited source does not cost this measure.

Published costings

none

No external costing of this position recorded to date.

Our calculation

€0bn

per year for the public accounts, zero cost.

The calculation

  • Status quo: The position maintains current law: zero cost compared with current policies.
Current law, sources and limits of the cost schedule

Current law. The mandatory system is pay-as-you-go. The only funded exceptions: the RAFP (civil service, €43.3bn in provisions) and the FRR (€21.2bn in assets at end-2023, which pays €1.45bn per year to the Cades in 2025). Voluntary retirement savings (PER) accounted for €8.3bn in benefits and €18.5bn in contributions in 2022, for outstanding assets of €292.7bn at end-2023. Their tax and social advantages cost about €1.8bn per year.

Horizon. €bn per year, 2025 base: revenue loss for the pay-as-you-go scheme during the transition, pensions unchanged.

Limits. Parameter “payment at the first job” (18 October 2026): arithmetic coefficient, 773,000 young people who left the education system for the first time in 2021 (Céreq, Génération survey) × amount paid, i.e. €0.77bn per year for €1,000; each leaver is assumed to obtain a job one day and to receive the payment once, the annual flow of first jobs then being equal to that of leavers. Leavers in 2017 numbered 746,000 (Céreq). Any switch to funded pensions has a double cost: the diverted contributions no longer finance current pensions, which the State must continue to pay. The range uses the yield of one point of contribution to the general scheme: €4.8bn (employee share, uncapped), €6.2bn (below the ceiling) and €7.6bn (employer share, uncapped), according to the DSS. A public endowment to a sovereign pension fund is costed as a lump sum equal to the amount paid in, hence the value 0 to be filled in according to the programme. Future financial returns are not counted in a static costing. A mere new tax incentive for the PER (retirement savings plan) is costed as a tax expenditure, from the €1.8bn benchmark. A public endowment to a funded pension fund is costed at the amount paid in, which is announced by the candidate; the cost of retirement savings incentives (€1.8bn) is a benchmark. Parameter “endowment at birth”: arithmetic coefficient, number of births in France in 2025 (Insee, 643,905) × amount paid, i.e. €0.64bn per year for €1,000. The number of births has fallen every year since 2010: the cost follows. Newborns of French nationality are slightly fewer than births in France. The payment is counted as spending (a transfer to the child); if it remained the property of a public fund, it could be classified as a financial transaction, which weighs on the debt and not on the deficit. Tax-exempt family top-ups and the fund's future return are not costed.

How to read these amounts. These are static costs and revenues, with no feedback effect, over a full year: nothing on growth, employment or the revenue that economic activity would gain or lose. A higher net cost does not on its own make a worse policy, nor net savings a better one: each programme rests on an economic model (demand-led stimulus, lower compulsory levies, consolidation of the public accounts…) that the cost schedule does not settle. GDP itself measures a volume of activity, not well-being or the usefulness of what is produced. Economic models and feedback effects.

This lever in the method · Costing for Jean-Luc Mélenchon

  1. Entretien avec La Tribune Dimanche, 10 May 2026. Words of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Position taken from public statements, not from a written programme. Read the source (Entretien avec La Tribune Dimanche).

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