President Macron will not receive his planned pay rise
French President Emmanuel Macron has confirmed that he is to renounce the planned €64 salary rise that he was due to receive automatically from January 1 2019.
The rise would have been automatically applied as part of the wider re-evaluation of national public servant wages, and would have represented a salary increase of 0.4%.
Yet, during a time of unrest for the Élysée - amid the gilets jaunes protests over the public’s buying power and the impact of low wages nationwide - Mr Macron has confirmed that his salary will remain the same and will not rise in January.
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, through a statement from Matignon, has confirmed the same for his salary.
More generally, public servants in France (known as “fonctionnaires”) are set to receive a pay rise of 0.3-0.6% from January 1.
The President and senior public office positions correspond to the highest level of “fonctionnaire” pay brackets, and would normally have benefitted from this wider increase.
Currently, the President and the PM each earn €15,140 gross per month. If the pay rise had gone ahead for the pair, they would have received an extra €64 gross each per month.
The current pay levels for the President were set by Mr Macron’s predecessor François Hollande, who dropped his salary by 30% soon after he came to office.
Before 2008 and the office of Nicolas Sarkozy, there was no official presidential salary level, but Mr Sarkozy changed this, setting it by decree, and increasing his pay packet by an unprecedented 172%.
