Who will be born?

A demographic crisis does not begin when a nation empties out. It begins much earlier, when the number of young people becomes insufficient to sustain the expectations built by previous generations.

In 2025 roughly 355,000 children were born in Italy. The average number of children per woman fell to 1.14, against 1.18 in 2024. In the same year deaths numbered about 652,000. This is not an occasional dip, but a process that progressively reshapes the structure of society.

Between 2004 and 2025 the share of the Italian population under fifteen fell from 14.2% to 11.9%, while the relative weight of the older age brackets keeps rising.

Demography, however, has a feature that politics struggles to accept: it does not obey electoral timescales.

A law can be approved in a few months. A generation takes about thirty years to be born, grow up, be educated and become fully active in the economy. Even if births rose sharply tomorrow, the effects on the labour market, on pensions and on the tax base would arrive much later. In the meantime, we will have to manage an older population, a smaller workforce and a growing demand for healthcare and assistance.

That is why one-off bonuses and so-called click days are not a demographic policy. They are administrative tools that turn a potential right into a digital competition between citizens. They reward those who arrive first, those who have better information, or those who manage to get through a procedure. They may offer relief, but they do not change the structure of family decisions.

A child is not decided upon because an online window has opened.

Birth rates depend on the ability to imagine the future. They require affordable housing, stable work, adequate wages, childcare services, full-time schools, transport, care for dependent people and a different organisation of work. Above all they require the perception that becoming a parent does not mean permanently compromising one's economic autonomy, especially for women.

But even these measures will not produce immediate miracles. The shrinking number of women of childbearing age makes the trend harder to reverse: each smaller generation produces, in turn, a smaller potential pool of parents.

So an uncomfortable truth must be spoken. Italy must prepare for a cycle of at least thirty years of hard choices. "Blood, sweat and tears" should not mean blind austerity or sacrifices always dumped on the same people. It should mean intergenerational realism: recognising that it will not be possible to preserve every arrangement of the past intact and, at the same time, finance the future.

We will have to work longer in some sectors, raise productivity, redesign pensions, attract qualified immigration, integrate newcomers better, invest in automation and bring back into the labour market a share of those currently inactive. We will also have to accept that some services be reorganised and that some territories change their function.

There is no single solution. There is a portfolio of choices, none of which is politically easy.

Immigration too, necessary to soften the imbalances, cannot be treated as a switch. Importing labour without building integration, training, housing and citizenship means postponing problems, not solving them. Conversely, refusing any migratory contribution while the working-age population shrinks means ignoring arithmetic.

Technology can help. Automation, robotics and artificial intelligence will let a smaller number of workers sustain higher levels of production. Telemedicine may relieve some healthcare activities. Smart homes may support the autonomy of the elderly. But technology will not care for a frail person out of empathy, will not build community and will not fully replace human time.

The demographic crisis is also a crisis of desire. A society that communicates permanent precariousness, distrust, generational conflict and decline does not convince people to invest twenty years of their lives in raising someone else.

That is why demographic policy cannot coincide with family policy. It is industrial, housing, educational, migratory, fiscal and cultural policy. It concerns the way we distribute security and risk across an entire lifetime.

The results of a serious policy will not be visible by the next election. Perhaps they will not be fully visible even during the career of those who approve it. This is the test of a ruling class: to work for citizens who do not yet vote, because they are not yet born.

The question is not only how many we will be.

It is: who will hold up the world we are leaving behind?