The negotiation of the last part of the pension reform is accelerating. After weeks of impasse without any new formal proposal on the table and with conversations between the Ministry of Inclusion and Social Security both with Brussels and with the parliamentary groups, the minister himself, José Luis Escrivá, announced this morning that there are significant advances, especially with Brussels.
"We are practically reaching an agreement with what seemed important to us as well and it was an in-depth discussion of all the elements of the reform with the European Commission," Escrivá said at the Finance Observatory organized by El Español and Invertia. As a consequence of this rapprochement, he has called a meeting with the social agents for tomorrow in which he will present the new proposal.
The minister expects an agreement "in the next few days", which would make it possible to meet a milestone in the recovery plan, such as completing the pension reform and, with this, provide Brussels with a positive evaluation of the achievement of objectives to have full access to the fourth payment of recovery funds.
Escrivá did not give details of the new proposal. He only pointed out that "it is the closure of the complete sustainability of the system." In addition, looking back, he defended the first phase of the pension reform, which has linked these benefits to the evolution of inflation, which contrasts with the 2013 reform, that of the PP government; which, according to Escrivá, would mean a significant cut in pensions, especially for future generations.
In addition, Escrivá stressed that the new proposal also solves the most problematic point, the pension calculation period. He tries to adapt this term, now fixed in the last 25 years of working life, to the new careers, which are less linear and do not always lead to the best years being the best. His first approach was to take the calculation to 30 years with the option of excluding the two worst years, which was rejected both by social agents and by the parties that habitually support the Government. In the negotiations, it was proposed, albeit informally, to reduce this period by one year, but without a solution coming to fruition.
On the part of both Podemos and ERC, there was opposition to this expansion of computing, while the unions stated that political support had to be obtained before closing an agreement with them. It is a consequence of the lessons learned during the stormy approval of the labor reform.
