29.07.2020, Moscow.
The measures aimed at softening the pension reform failed to improve the negative attitude it faced, lawyer and political scientist, candidate of legal sciences, professor of the Law Department of the Financial University at the Government of the Russian Federation Igor Semenovsky said on July 27 in an interview to a correspondent of the Rossa Primavera News Agency.
“The government has taken a number of measures to soften the pension reform; in particular, it introduced a ‘pre-retirement’ category of people keeping a number of former retirement benefits, but they failed to improve the negative attitude to the reform,” Semenovsky noted.
He stressed that people are mostly disappointed that “they now have to work 5 years longer while the difference in income between the rich and the poor keeps growing.”
The political scientist added that the people’s discontent “is aggravated with the low life expectancy in Russia, which is 68.5 years for men and 78.5 years for women.” In fact, “some of the people may never live up to retirement,” Semenovsky noted.
On October 3, 2018, the President of Russia Vladimir Putin signed an act increasing the retirement age to 60 for women and 65 for men.
The retirement age increase faced public discontent in the form of dramatic drop of poll numbers of the president and the United Russia party. At the regional elections in 2018 and 2019, the party of the state lost the elections in some regions to candidates from systemic political parties.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
