Italy faces its demographic decline

It is 7am on this first day of school in Italy. Alarm clocks are ringing to get the children out of bed and the first rays of sunshine are breaking through the clouds clinging to the mountain peaks of Abruzzo. After a morning espresso and a schoolbag, the streets of Avezzano, a town of 40,000 inhabitants in the centre of the country, are bustling with life. Dressed in their azure blue school aprons, the little ones are gambolling to meet their friends in front of the primary school. Parents are hugging each other, telling each other about their holidays, their hands twirling and their accents singing, a distillation of the charm of Italy. Under the covered playground, the teachers are counting their pupils: “17, 18… we are all there. The maximum is 27 children, but that number seems impossible to reach today. Full classes no longer exist,” observes Raffaella, a teacher for twenty years.

About fifteen kilometres to the north, in the village of Rosciolo dei Marsi, the euphoria of the start of the school year is a distant memory. Perched in the mountains, the Romanesque church of Santa Maria rings its bells in the deserted streets paved with white rocks. Here, wild vines colonise the facades in pastel purple or olive colours, and the shutters of the houses remain closed. The setting seems picturesque, the atmosphere timeless. In the village square, only a small café is holding out. At the counter, a few old men and a handful of workers. Among them, Alberto, 55, grew up here before leaving to work in Rome in his youth. “Fifty years ago, swarms of children played in the streets, there were cafés, farms, a nursery… But the population has shrunk, going from 1,500 inhabitants in the 1980s to less than 400 today. » Symbol of the era, the premises of the old school where Alberto studied as a child have been converted into circus anziani (“circle of elders”).

“Demographic winter”

The emptiness that is taking over Italian villages and schools, scientists have given it a name: “demographic winter”. A phenomenon as insidious as it is dizzying, which began in 1993, the year in which the birth curve fell below that of deaths in the peninsula. Thirty years later, Italy combines the fastest aging population in the world, behind that of Japan, with one of the lowest fertility rates in the European Union (1.22 children per woman). Less than 400,000 children were born in the country in 2023, a sad record since the unification of Italy in 1861. A “winter” that Giorgia Meloni has sworn to put an end to.

At the head of the ruling coalition for two years, the leader of the nationalist and conservative Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party, has designated the fall in the birth rate as her “top priority”. Creation of a Ministry of Family and Birth Rates; annual meeting of the Estates General of Birth Rates alongside Pope Francis; speech defending the traditional family delivered from the podium of the Demography Summit, the great gathering of the European conservative right organized in Hungary by Viktor Orban. It is an understatement to say that Giorgia Meloni, elected in 2022 on the slogan “God, Family, Homeland”, is struggling on the symbolic and rhetorical level. But what change is she making in the lives of Italians?

To support families, the coalition formed by his party, the centre-right Forza Italia of the late Silvio Berlusconi and the far-right Lega of Matteo Salvini has increased the remuneration of parental leave. It is also considering tax incentives summed up as “less taxes for more children” and is continuing the policy of the “universal check” combining all family allowances into a single benefit since 2021. Without tangible effects on births, for the moment.

“Blah blah…” Clara sighs when she talks about the government’s policy. At 46, this manager of a restaurant in the city centre of Avezzano, like many Italian women, has given up on becoming a mother so as not to sacrifice her professional life. “Having a child is a barrier to employment for many women. Some contracts even stipulate that in the event of pregnancy, the company reserves the right to dismiss her. And all this, without counting the shortage of public daycare centres, which Giorgia Meloni says she wants to remedy. Keeping your job and raising a child is an obstacle course.” With 27 places per 100 children aged 3 months to 3 years in early childhood structures in 2020, Italy is indeed well below the recommendation threshold, set at 45% by the European Union (EU). In France, this rate reaches 58% – in other words, around 4 out of 10 children cannot find a place to be looked after in France. In Italy, this concerns almost 7 out of 10.

A battle that is above all cultural

As a result of these difficulties in reconciling family life and work, the employment rate of women in the peninsula has plateaued, the lowest in the EU. In Giorgia Meloni’s mind, however, the economic determinants are secondary, the battle for the birth rate proving to be above all cultural. “The roots (of this crisis) do not only lie in the countercyclical phases of the economy, but – and this is more dangerous – in the shifting sands of the myth of the low birth rate and a now widespread culture of hostility to the family. A few decades ago, children were still being had even in times of war or when people were living in poverty,” she declared on 14 September 2023, at the Demography Summit in Budapest.

In 2019, in Abruzzo, his party won its first ever regional election. Since then, this mountainous area east of Rome has been considered the “political laboratory” of the Fratelli d’Italia. In Luco dei Marsi, a small village on the Fucino plain – a former lake that has become one of the cradles of intensive agriculture in the country – the paradoxes of Meloni’s Italy are obvious. It’s late morning and the market is in full swing in the town hall square. Among the stalls selling vegetables and cheap clothes, young women of North African or Albanian origin browse the stalls; across the street, sitting on the terrace of a café, gray-haired Italians read the Gazzetta dello Sport, the country’s oldest sports daily. Suddenly, an engine backfires in the distance and a burgundy-red van with a battered body stops in the middle of the street. The driver, an Italian, honks once and the sliding door opens: about ten workers get out, heads down, shovel and hoe in hand, soaked by the morning rain.

Necessary migrants

These are Moroccan and Tunisian immigrants. Illegal or legal, they come every day to cultivate carrots, potatoes and other vegetables from the Fucin plain under the status of corporal. A form of modern agricultural slavery, widespread in southern Italy, which makes them dependent on an intermediary who pays them a pittance. Behind his counter, Franco, the manager of the café, observes the scene without flinching and describes how the population of his countryside has changed since his family arrived in the region in 1960. “Of course the local Italians are racist, the majority voted for Giorgia Meloni. But they also know that we need these migrants to keep the economy going. The truth is that they take the jobs that young Italians no longer want.”

The Fratelli d’Italia party won power by holding an assumed anti-migrant discourse. And if Giorgia Meloni made the birth rate her priority, it is as much for her refusal to see immigrants of non-Christian culture build a new life on Italian soil as for her Catholic convictions. During a meeting in 2017, she spoke of “a planned and desired invasion”. In the eyes of the Italian leader and her supporters, increasing the number of births in the country responds to an identity need. Some in her party go even further, raising the specter of “ethnic replacement”. Like Francesco Lollobrigida, the Minister of Agriculture, who declared in April 2023: “Italians have fewer children, so let’s replace them with others. This is not the way to go. “Except that since coming to power, Giorgia Meloni has been confronted with the reality of the Italian economy: the second industrial power and fourth agricultural force in the EU needs workers. Under pressure from employers, the President of the Council has therefore ended up granting 450,000 residence permits to foreign workers.

A “familist” policy

In response to these anxieties of migratory submersion, Giorgia Meloni promotes not a “family policy but a familist policy,” says Massimo Prearo, a political science researcher at the University of Verona. “She is leading a campaign that uses the traditional, heterosexual, Christian family for political ends, refocusing everything on reproduction. In her mind, if real white Italians of Catholic origin have more children, then we will have a way to counter the ethnic replacement that immigration threatens us with.” Contacted, the regional authorities of Fratelli d’Italia did not respond to our requests.

On the coast of Le Marche, a rural and conservative region in central-eastern Italy, the blue of the Adriatic Sea contrasts with the arid ochre-coloured hills where olive groves grow. In the city centre of Ascoli Piceno, towers, bell towers and medieval buildings abound. However, it is an innocuous building that now occupies the attention of the Brothers of Italy. On the second floor are the offices of the Italian Association for Demographic Education (Aied), the Italian equivalent of family planning. “Since 1980, we had an agreement with the hospital in Ascoli to support women who wanted to have an abortion. It was abruptly withdrawn from us in 2023 by the region (in Italy, the regions have health competence, editor’s note), relates Tiziana Antonucci, the president of Aied. ​​Since then, the possibility for women to have an abortion has no longer been guaranteed in the region. » With Giorgia Meloni, the bodies of Italian women have become the subject of a cultural battle. Her government has adopted a measure allowing anti-abortion activists access to public consultation clinics in an attempt to dissuade women from terminating their pregnancies.

An objection provided for by law

The President of the Council claims not to seek to challenge the right to abortion, legalized since 1978, but simply wants to “defend the right not to abort”. However, the latter does not seem to be in danger: across the country, 70% of gynaecologists declare themselves “conscientious objectors” and refuse to perform abortions, in accordance with the clause introduced in 1978 in the law on voluntary termination of pregnancy. In Abruzzo or the neighboring region of Marche, this percentage even reaches 80%. Giorgia Meloni has three years left to roll out her pro-natalist policy, before the next legislative elections in Italy. Until then, there is no doubt that her supporters, like her detractors, will have their eyes glued to the birth curve.