Our social model is failing. We continue to bailout a system that has been drained of its meaning and resources. Demographics don’t lie: we are living longer, having fewer children, and the number of citizens losing their autonomy will increase rapidly. By 2050, nearly 700,000 people will live with severe loss of autonomy. This is not a temporary crisis, this is a structural change.
Faced with this demographic wall, we no longer have a choice: we must rethink our social protection, not reducing it but building it again. Because getting out of debt without transforming means condemning a system that reproduces itself identically – and heading for failure. Our model is built on benchmarks from other times.
Age, first: remains our administrative reference, when demographers invite us to think in “prospective age”, that is, the years of life to come. The risk: our health policies are designed to improve, not support. They ignore chronic illnesses and long life journeys, even though these are commonplace today. Finally, governance: Social Security alone covers imbalances that housing, transportation or land use planning cannot address. We must move away from the logic of permanent blockage.
Just as we can do for defense with a military program law, France should adopt a demographic transition program law. A law that requires every public policy – health, housing, employment, transportation – to integrate the realities of aging and declining birth rates.
A law that has an ambition: to make aging not a burden, but a driver of social cohesion and innovation. We can no longer manage the future with the tools of the past. The demographic transition is inevitable: it can become a national project. As long as you have the political courage to name it, plan for it, and accept it.
