Concern about this drain on the public finances and the burden on younger generations has prompted 18 MPs from Merz\u2019s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), its Bavarian affiliate, to take a stand.<\/p>\n
The politicians, who are all under the age of 35, are refusing to back the ruling coalition\u2019s pensions legislation unless it includes measures to restrain the bill in future.<\/p>\n
![\"Pascal](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\/9140b837-094a-47a7-96ca-05a1044d31a2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The Young Union of the CDU\/CSU<\/p>\n
MICHAEL WITTIG<\/p>\n
Since the coalition has a parliamentary majority of only 13 votes, the youth wing is effectively able to hold the law hostage. <\/p>\n
The MPs\u2019 chief complaint is that the law would effectively freeze the standard state pension at 48 per cent of the pensioner\u2019s pre-retirement income level after 2031, overriding an existing \u201cstabilisation\u201d mechanism that would gradually reduce it to 47 per cent.<\/p>\n
While this difference of a single percentage point might sound trivial, it is estimated to add up to as much as an extra \u20ac15 billion in public spending each year.<\/p>\n
The group argues that these costs \u201ccannot be justified to the younger generation\u201d and would \u201cartificially\u201d inflate older Germans\u2019 pensions. <\/p>\n
However, Merz<\/a> urged them to back down during a tense appearance at a conference held by the Young Union, the CDU-CSU\u2019s youth organisation, at a theme park in southwest Germany on Saturday.<\/p>\n Friedrich Merz during the conference in Morbach, southwest Germany<\/p>\n RONALD WITTEK\/EPA<\/p>\n The chancellor warned that the party would \u201cnot win any elections\u201d if it pursued a \u201crace to the bottom\u201d on pensions, saying: \u201cSurely you can\u2019t be serious.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the MPs driving the campaign insisted that it was not a rebellion and that the group was merely insisting on sticking to the terms of the CDU-CSU\u2019s original coalition agreement with its Social Democratic Party (SPD) allies.<\/p>\n \u2022 Johanna Noble: Europe\u2019s waking up to the state pension nightmare \u2014 we should too<\/a><\/p>\n The source suggested that Merz and his inner circle were fundamentally sympathetic to the fiscal logic of the group\u2019s case, but hamstrung for electoral reasons and by a need to appease his \u201cdoctrinaire\u201d partners in the SPD. <\/p>\n The over-60s are by far the largest age group in the electorate, making up 40 per cent of voters and tending to turn out in significantly greater numbers than younger generations. They are also disproportionately likely to vote for the CDU-CSU and the SPD. <\/p>\n Other leading figures in the CDU share the youth wing\u2019s worry about the future of the pensions system and the public finances. <\/p>\n Katherina Reiche, the CDU economics minister, recently argued that the standard retirement age \u2014 which at present is just over 66 but is scheduled to increase to 67 by 2031 \u2014 should automatically rise in line with life expectancy, as it does in Denmark<\/a>. <\/p>\n Over the weekend Reiner Haseloff, the widely respected CDU chief minister of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, told the Bild newspaper that the state was taking on so much debt to fund its spending that it was \u201cessentially broke\u201d. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has rebuked the youth wing of his conservative party as a group of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[45,49,48,133,131,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-287418","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-finance","12":"tag-personal-finance","13":"tag-personalfinance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Friedrich](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\/f67c8af0-ace3-47ec-8203-781341fb16ab.jpg\")
<\/p>\n