“We should avoid sending the wrong message to Greeks”

He appeared particularly "sensitive" towards the Greeks, after criticizing the "retirement at 63" in Germany and asking for a rise in the retirement age and even citing the case of Greece. This wasn't done by accident, since the only cases that lenders remember our country is when trey try to convince local audiences for the "correctness" of unpopular measures. Besides Oettinger had claimed, about two years ago, that "no country was treated as good as Greece". In this case, the German commissioner, in an interview, which will be published Tuesday in the newspaper Die Welt in Berlin and broadcasted by Deutsche Welle, is in favor of the pension at 70, arguing that it is necessary to implement the measure due to demographic developments and the distortions in the labor market. "We have a shortage of skilled labor and therefore, in the coming years will have to discuss the pension at 70. We must help people be retrained so they can work longer" he mentioned. To argue in favor of this point, he used the example of Greece, stressing that they would send the "wrong message" with the institutionalization of retirement at 63.

"We ask from the Greeks to work longer and for less money now, so they are surprised when they see the Germans moving in the opposite direction" he said forgetting of course dozens of wrong "messages" that were sent in recent years by Greece creditors. Oettinger's views are shared by the President of the German Institute for Economic Research Marcel Fratser. As he states in Die Welt: "rising life expectancy and demographic change makes retirement at 70 inevitable. Given the aging population there are only three options: either the new generation will be retiring after 67 or will pay higher contributions or will take smaller pensions". However, the unions object to increasing the retirement age, as they point out, many workers aren't able to perform as expected at such a late age. Moreover, they believe, the pension system doesn't have to save additional resources from the rise in the retirement age, but could be funded equally efficiently from the increase of productivity.