Last Tuesday, September 22, thousands of retirees joyfully received the admission of the bill that sought to eliminate pension reduction coefficients when applicants had been contributing for 40 years or more. News that, although it did not imply the immediate application of the proposal, did represent a quite important step, since it allowed its parliamentary processing. However, after Pedro Sánchez’s decision to dissolve the Cortes and call general elections, this procedure may not arrive.
The early electoral process has caused a multitude of parliamentary initiatives that were in the process of being processed to be blocked. Specifically, 305 laws proposed by the Government or whose evaluation was admitted by the Congress of Deputies have declined with the dissolution of the Cortes Generales. Including the one for which the Asjubi40 association had presented 200,000 signatures: the elimination of penalties for those who request early retirement.
The proposal, presented by Podemos, received 180 favorable votes and 170 abstentions on November 13, 2025. However, it was not until this September that Congress debated whether this modification of the rule could go ahead. Specifically, the document sought to modify the General Social Security Law, allowing the elimination of the pension reduction coefficients for those workers who had 40 or more years of contributions, even if they had requested early retirement. A measure that was intended to be retroactiveallowing those who were already harmed by this penalty to request the recalculation of their benefit.
The processing of the proposal is blocked with the electoral advance
However, and although it received 178 votes in favor and 136 abstentions, this did not allow it to come into force immediately. But, as Alfonso Muñoz, a Social Security official and external advisor to the Asjubi association40, explained, it gave rise to a long process of parliamentary processing in which its content could be modified and received amendments before drafting the final text, which had to be put to a vote again in the plenary session of the Congress of Deputies. A procedure that is blocked with the electoral advance.
As the official explains on his YouTube channel, in this type of situation, according to Spanish parliamentary law, the principle of discontinuity or expiration of legislative initiatives is applied. “This means that when the king declares the dissolution of the Cortes by calling elections, all legislative work that is underway at that moment automatically expires.” Therefore, all those proposals that have not completed their processing automatically declinewithout the possibility of resuming them with the formation of the next Government.
“You will have to start from scratch in the next legislature,” says Alfonso Muñoz
“There is no inheritance between legislatures; the new chamber that emerges from the polls does not take up the law at the point where the amendments left off,” he says. Which means that the proposal must be presented again to Congress for its approval if it begins its processing process again. That is to say, “will have to start from scratch in the next legislature”. News that has not been liked by the people affected by this penalty on their pensions, which, depending on the years of contributions and the months in advance, can vary between 2.81% and 21% of the total amount, if they have requested early retirement voluntarily.
According to Alfonso Muñoz, this “will mean delaying the solution for another one or two years” until it can become law, provided it has sufficient support in Congress. A situation that will continue to affect 900,000 pensioners, according to the association’s estimates. Pensioners to whom the economic supplement for early retirement that came into force on March 1, 2022, under Law 21/2021, and which grants a bonus of between 4.5 and 82 euros to those with more than 44.5 years of contributions, seems insufficient, since, as they denounce, Only 1 in 10 retirees receive it.