My dear friends, good morning!
A total of 56,223 people. That is how many Greece lost in a single year, 2025, through natural decrease. According to ELSTAT, there were 65,618 births and 121,841 deaths.
And what are we doing about it?
Benefits, tax breaks, announcements and, from time to time, grandiose declarations. All potentially useful. But are they enough to reverse the trend?
The European Commission’s new report gives a sense of the scale of the challenge. By 2080, Greece is projected to lose around 2.7 million residents and 1.6 million people from its labour force. More than a third of the population will be over 65, while average annual potential growth is forecast at just 0.8% for 2026-2080.
Projections, of course. Not prophecies. But they show the scale of the threat if conditions do not change substantially.
Who will generate wealth? Who will pay pensions, fund the national health system and service public debt? Who will staff the armed forces?
These are basic questions for a country that continues to discuss growth almost exclusively in terms of investment, subsidies and fiscal performance.
But investment needs workers. The pension system needs contributions. And national defence cannot be secured through arms procurement programmes alone.
Without people, growth is not a plan. It is a wish.
The government has not been idle. It has introduced a birth allowance, tax breaks and measures to support families. But adding up measures is one thing; having a strategy is another.
What is the target for births over the next decade? How much have the measures taken so far achieved? Which are being revised because they have not worked? And how are all these measures linked to housing, youth employment, the return of those who emigrated and the depopulation of the regions?
When a young couple struggles to pay the rent, when having a child clashes with job insecurity and access to a nursery place is not guaranteed, the problem cannot be solved with a cheque after the birth.
Nikos Vettas, head of IOBE, recently pointed out that policies to address the demographic challenge must be implemented today to deliver results in 20 or 30 years.
The demographic challenge requires planning over decades. Our political life operates on a four-year horizon. That is precisely why responsibility does not lie solely with the government.
The opposition, which ought to demand specific commitments and put forward its own proposals, has not made the issue a central focus of political debate.
A telling sign of the priority it is given is that even the Commission’s new report was not at the centre of yesterday’s political debate.
Of course, demographic decline is not the responsibility of a single government. It has deep roots and spans many administrations. That is precisely why it cannot be treated as an issue for just one more term in office.
What is needed is a national strategy, with specific targets, stable funding, evaluation of results and continuity, whoever is in government. Not another committee to establish what is already known. Nor yet another plan to be announced and then forgotten.
There is a difference that should concern everyone: a country can refinance its debt. It can make up for lost investment. It can rebuild infrastructure that has been abandoned.
A generation that was never born, however, cannot be replaced with a retroactive benefit.