In April this year Eurostat said the population of the European Union would peak in 2029 at 453.3 million and then fall to 398.8 million by 2100.
Around 150 BC Polybius recorded much the same about Greece: a shortage of children and a general depopulation, with no war or plague to account for it. The cause, he decided, lay in men who would not marry, or raised one or two children so that each might have more.
Twenty-two centuries on, what Pierre Chaunu called in 1976 the peste blanche, the white plague, is handled either in anaesthetised technical language or in euphemism. Demography moves quietly for decades and then turns irreversible at a stroke. The mothers of 2050 have already been born, and what is changing in Europe is not only the number of inhabitants but who they are.
In 2025, 4.81 million people died in the EU and 3.46 million were born, the 14th consecutive year of natural decline. The population rose all the same, to 452 million, carried by net migration of 2.05 million. Since 2012 every year of growth has come from abroad. Spain gained 442,428 residents in 2025 although more people died there than were born, and one in five of its 49.6 million residents on January 1, 2026 had been born abroad.
Fertility in the EU fell in 2024 to 1.34 children per woman, the lowest of the series, against 2.62 in 1964 and a replacement threshold of 2.1. Not even France, at 1.61, comes close, and Spain stands at 1.10, Italy at 1.18. One in four children born in the Union that year had a foreign-born mother.
Aristotle placed the family at the origin of the city and Leo XIII wrote in 1891 that it precedes civil society. Every function the family stops performing is taken up by power, so a State that grows and a family that shrinks are not two phenomena but one.
Of the 203 million households in the Union, 23.4 per cent contain children, and the commonest type, at 37.5 per cent, is the adult living alone. Between 2016 and 2025 the EU population grew by 8 million people while couple-with-children households fell by 2 million. The European Commission has kept a demographic toolbox since 2023 with immigration among its instruments, which is to confuse size with identity.
The material condition of any family is a home, and in Europe it is out of reach at the age of parenthood. Between 2010 and 2025 house prices in the Union rose 58 per cent and rents 28 per cent, while real wages have barely recovered their 2019 level. Young Europeans leave their parents’ house at 26 on average, Spaniards and Italians at 30. Of every €100 it costs to employ an average worker in Spain, more than €40 goes in tax and contributions before reaching his pocket. Proletarius in Rome was the man who owned nothing but his offspring. Europeans have inverted the equation.
Mass immigration is presented as the remedy when it is part of the same machine. The United Nations calculated in 2000, in Replacement Migration, that the EU of 15 would need some 47 million immigrants by 2050 to hold its population steady, and around 700 million to preserve the ratio of workers to pensioners. Its own authors concluded the second figure lay beyond reach.
The official account insists immigrants do the work Europeans will not. Spain has 2.5 million unemployed, one of the highest jobless rates on the continent, and one of the lowest shares of unfilled posts, 0.9 per cent against an EU average of 2 per cent. What is scarce is not labour but pay that will support a life. Foreign workers there earn €1,846 gross a month on average against €2,508 for nationals and hold 55 per cent of domestic service jobs, trades Spaniards worked in the 1990s on a wage that covered a mortgage. The immigrant accepts what the native cannot without giving up a family, fixing a price for work paid by natives with the least and enjoyed by those with the most. The OECD puts their net fiscal contribution for 2006-2018 at between −1 per cent and +1 per cent of GDP across most of its members, negative in 18 of 25 once public goods are charged to them.
Social protection absorbs about 27 per cent of the Union’s GDP, and each State operates in practice as an enormous pension fund. A pay-as-you-go system of the kind Europe generalised after 1945, heir to the insurance Bismarck devised in 1889, requires contributors who increase without end. When they stop, there are two roads: Reform or import. Governments took the second and called it humanitarianism.
A census can grow while the nation dissolves. Edmund Burke described society as a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born. The demographic question is not one of pensions or labour supply but of whether Europeans still take themselves for heirs of a civilisation. Polybius wrote while Rome was razing Corinth. Plutarch noted later that all Greece could barely muster 3,000 hoplites. The cities were still standing, with their magistrates, their temples and their laws. Without Greeks.
