Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants fewer people to retire early. “It is important to increase the proportion of those who can really work until retirement age. That is difficult for many today,” said the SPD politician to the newspapers of the Funke media group and the French newspaper Ouest France. Scholz also sees “potential for increase” in the proportion of women in the labor market. “But for that to work, we have to expand all-day offers in crèches, day-care centers and schools.”
According to calculations by the Federal Institute for Population Research, more and more people in Germany are retiring early. According to this, many leave the labor market at the age of 63 or 64 – and thus well before the standard retirement age. The institute in Wiesbaden announced that the rapid increase in the employment rate among the over-60s, which was observed at the beginning of the millennium, has largely come to a standstill in the past five years.
One reason for this is the “pension at 63”, i.e. the possibility of early retirement without deductions for people who have 45 years of insurance, which has existed since 2014. In the legislative process at that time, 200,000 to 240,000 of these pension applications per year had been assumed. According to information from the German pension insurance in November, almost 270,000 new pensioners used the deduction-free route last year. That was about a quarter of all new pensions.
Immigration from abroad required
At the same time, the German economy is suffering from a labor shortage. “We can absorb some things by creating better starting opportunities for young people and investing in vocational training and further education,” said Scholz. “And we will also need immigration from other countries to ensure our prosperity.”
Scholz also defended the government’s plan to to facilitate naturalization in Germany. “For a long time, those who immigrated to Germany were treated as if they would leave the country again later – obtaining citizenship was not the priority,” he said. “But we have long been an immigration country and now want to bring it into line with international standards.”
In many states, citizenship is obtained after five years. That should also be the case in this country, “if you can speak German, earn your own living and have not committed any crimes,” said Scholz. With several legislative projects the traffic light had recently begun to reform German migration policy, for example with the so-called right of residence and changes to nationality law.