Thirty years since this country’s major parties met in a parador in Toledo to protect something as basic as the dignity of our pensions, we are now witnessing a phenomenon that is as disturbing as it is surprising: political formations willing to undermine this historic consensus.
We see it when they vote against the annual revaluation according to the CPI, and we hear it when they repeat that the system is unsustainable even though data, independent reports – including the AIReF report – and the country’s economic reality say exactly the opposite.
We do not live in the Spain of 1995, which has descended into a deep recession. In 2025, we will be an economy growing faster than the countries around us, with historic employment numbers and a labor market approaching 22 million members, eight and a half million more than it was 30 years ago.
However, rather than celebrating that the system is responding, some prefer to build a narrative of impending collapse that we have been hearing since the 1980s.
Here we must say clearly: attacks on the public retirement system are not harmful. This is not just another technical discussion. We are talking about the well-being and tranquility of the 9.4 million people who receive a pension today and all those who will receive it tomorrow. Those who question the sustainability of the system, and those who refuse to support the revaluation of pensions, have a clear goal: to fuel uncertainty for millions of families.
In the face of this situation, we would do well to remember where we come from. The Toledo Pact was created to protect the regime from political fluctuations and ensure its long-term stability. This approach worked in 1995, in 2003, in 2011, and then again in 2020. There have been exceptions. For example, the failed reform in 2013, promoted by the Popular Party, which froze pensions and ended up being rolled back because it jeopardized the purchasing power of those who no longer had the space to respond on the issue. It is a reform that the Toledo Charter itself described in 2020 as having little “political and social consensus.”
Today, on the contrary, the path is clear. In January, if forecasts are maintained, pensions will be revalued by 2.7% according to the CPI. As the law states, as the Toledo Charter advocates, and as it requires any society to respect those who have worked all their lives. This vote in Congress will test the responsibility of all parliamentary groups.
I hope that this year the PP will stop making empty promises at election events about increasing pensions, and will get involved, with its votes in its favor, where it should: in the House of Representatives. I hope they will not subject pensioners to the agony of last year’s first ‘against’ vote that kept so many people up at night.
I tell them that we can be optimistic about the future because the present data allow us to do so. The reforms implemented in recent years, the dynamism of the labor market, the improvement in the quality of employment and the positive impact of migration flows are real, measurable and solid pillars.
It is these elements – not hype or rhetoric – that allow us to look to the coming decades with confidence, even in the face of the demographic challenge of the retirement of the generation born after the 1960s.
Our youth know that their grandparents deserve adequate and decent pensions. But they also need certainty that they themselves will be able to access a fair pension when the time comes. This is the true mission of the Toledo Charter: to provide certainty. For this reason, the matter is so dangerous that there are parties willing to risk it for the sake of electoral calculations.
Let’s leave behind our self-serving discomfort. Let’s go back to the consensus that allowed Spain to have one of the most solid and fair pension systems in Europe. Because protecting the Toledo Charter today means that in thirty years we will not have to defend it, but merely celebrate it. Because protecting it today means that decent pensions are not discussed, but rather simply guaranteed.
Elma Saez She is Minister of Integration, Social Security and Immigration.