The German far left grants last-minute approval to pension reform
The opposition party Die Linke announced on Wednesday that it would abstain from Friday’s vote on pension reform, thus allowing Friedrich Merz’s government to avoid a potentially destabilizing parliamentary defeat. This abstention effectively guarantees the passage of the highly contested bill and offers the chancellor a respite after several weeks of political tension.
The bill aims to maintain current levels of state pensions until 2031, a measure presented as a key pillar of the coalition agreement between the conservative Merz party and the center-left Social Democrats. With a parliamentary majority limited to just twelve votes, the government risked seeing its reform collapse without the intervention of Die Linke.
For the government, this temporary compromise secures one of the major social projects of its term. But the abstention of the far left does not equate to political support: Die Linke continues to denounce a plan deemed insufficient to protect pensioners from inflation and growing inequality.
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