Changes moderate and inevitable

The pension reform in France is moderate and its opponents are just being stubborn, writes the columnist for the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman, in a commentary for the Slovak business paper Hospodárske noviny: "If there was an informal European Union championship for street protest then Greece and France would be the two most regular winners. ... The French seem to enjoy strikings. Last week there was a slightly festive air. ... There is something faintly ridiculous about schoolchildren striking to protect their pensions ... . The French people, by contrast, still do not seem to realise the potential gravity of their situation. Their government's proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 is an extremely mild reform - certainly compared with ... other debt-stricken European countries ... . It may need a genuine fiscal crisis finally to persuade the French that, as Margaret Thatcher once put it: 'There is no alternative.'"

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