Retirement age: FDP promotes flexible pensions

Chancellor Scholz spoke out in favor of incentives for more people to work until they retire than before. FDP politician Vogel is now calling for people to be free to choose how long they want to work.

The FDP gratefully takes up the pension debate initiated by Olaf Scholz – and with its own proposals goes far beyond the Chancellor’s initiative: “No one has to tell people when they have to retire anymore,” says FDP Vice President Johannes Vogel for an end to the official retirement age.

At the weekend, Scholz spoke out in favor of more people than before working until the applicable retirement age. Since then, the topic of pensions has been discussed intensively again.

Vogel takes this opportunity to recall the so-called “Swedish model”: Those who retire earlier receive lower pension payments, while those who retire later receive higher pension payments. A sentence that is already in the FDP election program for 2021. According to the proposal, from the age of 60 people could decide for themselves when to retire.

Dialogue with social partners

Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil can also imagine more flexibility and is promoting “partial retirement”. “The best thing would be a system in which people from a certain age decide for themselves how long and how much they want to work,” the SPD politician told the “Tagesspiegel”. But those who are no longer able or willing to work must also leave earlier and be able to live on their pension.

Left parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch emphasized in Deutschlandfunk, it is important to enable older people to work – with age-appropriate jobs instead of being forced to continue working in old age. He also called for a pension reform so that civil servants and the self-employed also pay into the statutory pension insurance system.

In the coalition agreement, the SPD, the Greens and the FDP stated that they want to engage in dialogue with the social partners in order to be able to more easily fulfill wishes to stay longer in working life. FDP Vice President Vogel calls for a resolute approach to the project. The focus should be on the Scandinavian model as well as on the situation of particularly vulnerable groups.

More often retirement at 63 or 64

The coalition agreement rules out raising the retirement age further. According to the current legal situation, the age limit is to be gradually raised from 65 to 67 by 2029 without deductions. A month ago, however, the employer representative on the federal board of pension insurance, Alexander Gunkel, suggested that the age limit for pensions should be re-examined.

Ver.di boss Frank Werneke called for the regulations that allow earlier retirement to be left untouched. “Many people retire earlier and accept high financial losses because they see it as the only way out of a workload that they cannot handle until retirement age,” he told the “Stuttgarter Zeitung” and the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten”. .

Current calculations by the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) showed last week that many people in Germany are already leaving the labor market at the age of 63 or 64. An important role is played by the so-called pension at 63, i.e. the possibility of drawing a pension early without deductions, which has existed since 2014 for those who have been insured for a particularly long time.

With information from Kai Küstner, ARD capital studio