52 Europe The Economist February 26th 2022
The other weakness is pension reform.
The average effective age of retirement for
men in France is 60 years, well below the 63
years in Germany and 64 years in Britain.
Yet at the start of the pandemic Mr Macron
shelved his ambitious plan to merge the
country’s sprawling 42 pension schemes,
and to raise the retirement age. The next
president will have little choice but to take
on this reform.
Mrs Pécresse vows to raise the pension
age from 62 to 65, and the farright Eric
Zemmour wants to increase it to 64. But
this is not a message many French voters
want to hear. Pension reform is the one
policy almost guaranteed to prompt strikes
and protests. Indeed most candidates on
the left, including the radical JeanLuc Mélenchon, as well as the nationalistpopu
list Marine Le Pen, promise instead to
bring the pension age down.
In the short time left to him to cam
paign, Mr Macron will be able to defend a
reasonably good economic record. But
elections are seldom won on past achieve
ments. Voters remain sceptical about the
effect on their own purses, even though av
erage incomes grew on his watch, and they
are worried about the rising cost of living
and energy bills. If Mr Macron is serious
about reviving the reformist spirit of his
campaign in 2017, he will need to present
both credible pension reform and a decent
plan to fix public finances.This means tell
ing French voters some uncomfortable
truths, whatever it costs. nI
t had beenbilledasthetrialofthe
century. It would spotlight Pope Fran
cis’s determination to stamp out fi
nancial jiggerypokery by establishing
whether and how the Vatican was tricked
and extorted out of tens of millions of
euros in a botched property deal. Among
the defendants was a “prince of the
church”: Cardinal Angelo Becciu (pic
tured), former deputy head of the Vat
ican’s most exalted department, the
Secretariat of State. Yet seven months
after Cardinal Becciu and nine other
defendants were arraigned in court in
the Vatican, not a word of evidence has
been heard. The main outcome from
seven preliminary hearings has been
awkward questions about the genial
pontiff’s respect for the rule of law.
The case centres on the Secretariat of
State’s purchase and subsequent sale of a
commercial property in London—tran
sactions in which more than €100m
($113m) in donations collected from the
faithful were lost. Like previous Vatican
financial scandals, this one is richly
spiced with improbable detail. The latest
twist to emerge is that in 2019, shortly
before the scandal broke, Pope Francis
signed an edict authorising the Vatican’s
prosecutors to use wiretaps that were
placed on Italian subjects in Italy.
The edict was among four, known in
Latin as rescripta, signed by the pontiff
between July 2019 and February 2020 at
the request of the prosecutors overseeing
the investigation into the property deal.
The rescripta exempted them from sever
al limitations placed on them by the
Vatican’s legal code. Unlike all previous
papal rescripta, they were kept secret. Theedictsarenowat the heart of the
courtroom wrangles that have so far
delayed the case. Defence counsel have
argued for the charges against their
clients to be dismissed on two grounds.
Firstly, that the rescripta in effect sus
pended the rule of law in the Vatican,
vitiating any investigations conducted
while they were effect. The second is
that, armed with pontifical waivers, the
prosecution acted with a contempt for
the rules that violated the defendants’
rights to a fair trial. The prosecutors are
still refusing to comply fully with an
order by the presiding judge to hand over
to the defence all the evidence collected.
They argue that the omissions are to
shield the reputations of the accused.
And, of course, they have the backing, if
not of God, then of the man Catholics
believe is His earthly representative.TheVaticanHoly See-saw
ROME
Did the pope restrict defendants’ rights?The cardinal waitsSpainThunder on
the right
B
eleaguered andalmost alone in his
party’s headquarters, abandoned by its
powerbrokers and most of its mps, a be
mused Pablo Casado this week suffered the
implosion of his leadership of the People’s
Party (pp), Spain’s mainstream conserva
tive opposition. At a meeting that lasted in
to the early hours of February 24th, the par
ty’s regional barons allowed him to save
face by staying on as a figurehead until an
emergency party congress on April 2nd. In
return he agreed to back as his successor
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the experienced
president of the region of Galicia who is
the consensus choice. A smooth transition
matters not just to the pp but to Spain. Vox,
a newish hardright outfit, is snapping at
the pp’s heels in polls, largely because of
Mr Casado’s ineffectual leadership.
Two things precipitated Mr Casado’s
fall. The first was his decision to force an
early regional election in Castilla and Le
ón. Far from a hopedfor absolute majority,
the pp achieved only a pyrrhic victory; the
big winner was Vox. Then Mr Casado
rounded on Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the presi
dent of Madrid’s regional government and
a former protégéturnedrival. He and his
abrasive deputy, Teodoro García Egea, ac
cused Ms Ayuso of corruption over a €1.5m
($1.7m) contract for face masks early in the
pandemic from which her brother earned
€56,000. She said she was not involved in
the contract and her brother had long
worked in health procurement. A prosecu
tor has opened an investigation.
Although Ms Ayuso was damaged by the
revelation, Mr Casado had declared a war
he could not win. The leader of the party’s
libertarian wing, she is the party’s popular
darling, having handsomely won a snap re
gional election last year. Several thousand
of her fans demonstrated outside pp head
quarters. After angry meetings Mr Casado
sacrificed Mr Egea, an apparatchik widely
hated in the party. But it was not enough
for his critics. “I don’t know why I have to
go,” Mr Casado reportedly told a colleague.
“I have done nothing.” That only went to
show his lack of political awareness.
Mr Casado became leader at the age of
just 37 when he won a party primary in- An eloquent orator and an amiable
man with no experience in government, he
has never seemed up to the job. Instead of
setting out an alternative to Pedro Sán
chez’s leftwing coalition, he merely
sniped at it while steering an erratic course
M ADRID
The opposition is ditching an
ineffectual leader