(de-news.net) – Bert Rürup, a prominent pension specialist and former head of Germany’s Council of Economic Experts, has sought to temper public expectations regarding the government’s forthcoming reform initiative. He maintained that the statutory pension system had never been designed to guarantee the preservation of living standards achieved in the final years of employment. According to his assessment, the majority of contributors had consistently failed to receive replacement rates approaching 70 or 80 percent of their prior earnings, a level often assumed to be attainable but in practice beyond the system’s capacity. Rürup further emphasized that Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) would face unavoidable political pressure to deliver a credible and comprehensive reform package. In his judgment, the chancellor’s prospects for a second term would hinge on presenting a substantive policy achievement in this domain, making the pension issue a decisive test of leadership.

Within the broader debate, SPD General Secretary Tim Klüssendorf advanced the principle of a socially tiered model as a guiding framework. He stressed that the durability and coherence of the overall system mattered more than adherence to a single numerical benchmark, such as the frequently cited requirement of 45 contribution years. Reform, he argued, should not be narrowly equated with reductions in benefits but must instead be oriented toward long‑term sustainability and distributive fairness. Klüssendorf called for bold and innovative measures, including the possibility of granting proportionally larger increases to lower pensions compared with higher ones. He pointed to examples from other countries where differentiated growth mechanisms had proven effective, noting that smaller pensions were often favored in the calculation process and thereby enabled recipients to benefit twice—once through the initial weighting and again through subsequent adjustments.

Klüssendorf also endorsed the idea of linking retirement age to occupational characteristics. He reasoned that individuals who entered physically demanding professions at a young age and later struggled to continue working were disadvantaged by a uniform statutory threshold. A fixed legal retirement age, in his view, failed to account for the unequal burdens imposed by different types of employment. Consequently, he argued that it would be both logical and equitable to consider the age at which employment began, the cumulative duration of contributions, and the specific nature of the work performed. Such an approach, he suggested, would create a more balanced system that recognized the diversity of career paths and the varying physical demands placed upon workers across the labor market.