Rich people and pensions: Suddenly there is talk of “miscasting” – in the CDU

This weekend, Economics Minister Katherina Reiche (CDU) said what everyone knows, but which the rest of the cabinet has disciplinedly ignored: "It can't be sustainable in the long run that we only work two-thirds of our adult lives and spend one-third in retirement ," Reiche told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) . Her conclusion: "Working life span must increase."

What the minister means: Those who retired in the first decades after the start of the pay-as-you-go system in 1957 received an average of ten to eleven years of pension – after 45 years of work. Today, after just 40 years of work, pension payments last twice as long on average. And in the future, there will be even more, because – to paraphrase Adenauer: people are always getting older.

So the system is faltering, but the outrage reflex is working. The German Social Association warned against "raising the retirement age through the back door" – as if we were a nation of roofers and geriatric nurses on the verge of early retirement. The German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) is naturally also concerned.

The harshest criticism, however, came from the CDU's social wing. Christian Bäumler, deputy head of the Christian Democratic Employees' Association (CDA) , even sees Reiche as an alien element in the cabinet: "Anyone as Minister of Economic Affairs who doesn't realize that Germany has a high part-time employment rate and thus a low average annual working time is a misfit," said the representative from the social wing.

Foreign body? Miscast? With party friends like that, you don't need Bärbel Bas as a brake on reform anymore. And regarding part-time work: If Reiche had demanded that more women work full-time – which makes economic sense – the social wing would have gone even further.

Unfortunately, his fellow party member Bäumler is right about one thing: Reiche's demands have "no basis in the coalition agreement." That's the problem. And the fact that the CDU leadership is standing by while their economics minister is publicly attacked from the second row speaks volumes.

Only employers' association president Rainer Dulger commented approvingly: "The rendezvous with reality has begun in the federal government." What is unclear is whether Reiche, as a regulatory conscience, is not actually a foreign body in this cabinet.