Pensions are safe - or not?

On 21 April 1986, on the market square in Bonn, the then Minister of Labour, Norbert Blüm, took a brush and himself pasted up the first poster in an information campaign on how safe pensions were. © picture-alliance / dpa | Peter Popp Provision for our old age concerns all of us. In this fact-check, Prof. Aloys Prinz , Director of the Institute of Public Economics II at the University of Münster, and Fabian Dittrich , one of the two spokesmen of the German Institute of Old-Age Insurance, provide an overview of how the pension system is financed and they talk about the future challenges posed by demographic change. Norbert Blum, a member of Germany's Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) and Minister of Labour and Social Affairs from 1982 to 1998, called upon people to trust the pension system when, in 1986, he said, "Pensions are safe". Not many statements from a politician have stayed in the minds of the German population as much as this one did. But is it actually true? Aloys Prinz: It was, and still is, more a wish than actual reality. Even in 1986 it was already clear that there were problems in financing pensions paid out under the state pension scheme.