BUDAPEST — After years of people having fewer children, Europe is on the brink of a great contraction. Next year, the European Union expects its population to hit a peak before sliding into the first sustained decline on the continent since the 14th-century Black Death.
That trajectory has raised alarms about shrinking workforces and the possibility of economic insolvency. So governments of every political stripe are scrambling to test whether some mix of perks, incentives and ideology might spark a baby boom.
Countries across Scandinavia have launched commissions to recommend new strategies, while soul-searching over why their famously strong welfare programs couldn’t prevent a fertility rate nosedive. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has talked of the need to “demographically rearm” the nation after fertility rates fell 18 percent over a decade. And in a handful of countries with nationalist leaders, governments are rolling out generous financial incentives for potential parents — while also extolling traditional families.
Italy is giving bonuses to working mothers with two or more children. Poland last year boosted a monthly payment to families — $220 for every child every month — and in October its president signed off on a large tax break for parents with two children or more.
Those sorts of financial incentives might sound appealing across the Atlantic, where Vice President JD Vance and some other U.S. politicians are similarly lamenting population trajectories, and Americans tell pollsters that the expense of raising children is the primary deterrent to having more of them. The Trump administration has already made a few initial policy moves, including one that will seed $1,000 in accounts for newborns that can be accessed when they turn 18.
But the lesson so far from Europe is that even enormous government programs might yield just fractional change. Even the best successes have merely slowed the pace of population decline, rather than reversing it.
No country better embodies the ambitions and limits than Hungary, where years of policy expansion have led to a system of benefits almost Scandinavian-like in its generosity. The country now spends 5 percent of its gross domestic product on family policies, a greater percentage than what the United States devotes to defense.
It offers grandparental leave. It furnishes reduced mortgage rates to married couples planning families. It provides parents $30,000 loans — which don’t need to be repaid if they have three or more children.
On Oct. 1, all women with three children gained lifetime personal income tax exemptions. Next year, mothers under 40 with two kids will become exempt as well.
“For the long-term survival of a nation, it is worthwhile,” said Hungary’s culture minister, Balazs Hanko, a father of four.
Yet decisions about childbirth are deeply personal, sometimes beyond the reach of policymaking. They can also be tied to stubborn structural problems: the high cost of housing, for instance, or inflation. And the fertility rate drop also reflects progress that few societies would want to roll back, including widely available contraception, a reduction in teenage pregnancy, and the advancement of women’s education and careers.
Fertility rates are declining in so many places that the trend is often seen as a function of modernity itself — where parenthood becomes something for people in their early or mid-30s with stable jobs and a mortgage.
Why fertility rates are declining
Until the 1960s, most of Europe maintained fertility rates above 2.1 births per woman, the level needed to sustain a population. Then the tumble began, though unevenly: The Scandinavian countries stayed relatively higher into the early 2010s, while other nations — especially in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean — plunged earlier and more deeply. But now, they have arrived mostly at the same place. Only 5 of 27 E.U. countries have birth rates above 1.5, and none is above 1.9. The E.U. fertility rate stands at a record low 1.38 births per woman.
Those who do want children start later than ever.
“I think young people are in a little bit of an existential crisis right now,” said Andras Barany, 28, a university student in Budapest.
On a cigarette break before class, he said he does want children — eventually. But the conversation quickly shifted to doubts about the future because of global turmoil and the threats posed by technology. He also first needs a partner. And a job.
“So I don’t have a lot of hope that policy can help the matter,” he said. “I think it’s more complex.”
Both real constraints and shifting perceptions are influencing decisions. In many countries, home prices and the cost of living have soared. Also, as women have seen their education and job prospects increase, children have come to represent a greater “opportunity cost,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says.
Anna Rotkirch, a researcher commissioned by Finland to propose ways to bolster the fertility rate, said that multiple forces are converging at once in the lives of young people and influencing their decisions to delay or forgo parenthood.
Social media idealizes a life of travel and individualism. Dating apps give the impression of abundant choices — making it harder to find a partner and settle down. A generation of young people, themselves raised in small families, don’t have much sense about what it means to be around a baby — not just the work involved, but the tactile joys.
In Finland, the number of young people who say they want to remain childless had tripled in the early 2010s and stayed high ever since, Rotkirch said, citing years of national surveys.
“I increasingly think what is happening, the childless population sees parenting as a worse sacrifice than it actually is,” Rotkirch said. “[They think] motherhood will make you look old. You will sacrifice everything. It will be the end of all fun.”
What can societies do about shrinking population?
Should addressing depopulation even be a government priority? The issue can be divisive.
Some argue for embracing the decline, which will unfold gradually and could make societies more environmentally sustainable. They say it’s hyperbole when people like Elon Musk describe “population collapse” as humanity’s greatest threat. By 2100, even under the lowest-case fertility scenario, the E.U. will still have almost 350 million people — a reduction of 100 million, but hardly a ghost town.
Tomas Sobotka, the deputy director at the Vienna Institute of Demography, recently helped run a simulation of when humankind might reach a critically endangered threshold, if fertility rates hold as projected.
The answer: the year 3484.
“I think there are much more immediate threats to our civilization,” Sobotka said.
But the large overall population can mask the structural shifts taking place. The developed world has built health care and retirement systems that depend on working-age people far outnumbering retirees — and over the past centuries, they have.
Thirty years ago, across Western Europe, there were four adults younger than 65 for every one senior. Now the ratio is about 3 to 1. By 2050, it’ll be less than 2 to 1.
And by 2100, according to United Nations projections, Western Europe will have more people age 85 than 5. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company said that this youth scarcity will push societies into “uncharted waters,” depressing economic growth as younger generations shoulder the huge cost of retirees.
Immigration is often held up as a solution for countries with declining populations. But over the next decades, the proposition becomes more fraught. Fertility rates have fallen below replacement level in every region of the world except sub-Saharan Africa.
China’s fertility rate hasn’t recovered even after the Communist Party scrapped its one-child policy in 2016.
India, the world’s most populous country, is seeing stark declines. Its capital, New Delhi, has a fertility rate on par with southern Europe, among the lowest in the world.
“India itself will be needing immigrants before very long,” said Stephen Shaw, a documentarian whose work on population decline has been cited by Musk. “It’s a Band-Aid.”
Demographers tend to lament that debates over these views have become embedded in Western culture wars, in part because of Musk. Conservatives have hosted big demography conferences that draw far-right podcasters and feature speeches about the ills of liberalism and a Western mindset that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described as being “hostile to the family.”
Hungary is emblematic of the tone: Viktor Orban, the longtime prime minister, casts the movement as a proxy fight against the “woke virus.” Some of his efforts to boost the birth rate coincided with a ban on LGBTQ+ content in schools and on prime-time TV. Same-sex couples are largely excluded from Hungary’s fertility incentives.
Other E.U. countries have been broadly critical of Orban, saying he has transformed Hungary into an electoral autocracy and undermined basic rights. But Rotkirch, the Finnish researcher, said that while she disagrees with Orban’s politics, Hungary is deploying programs that could genuinely address the financial hurdles of starting a family.
“I would not condemn [Hungary],” she said. “I would study them, look at their effects.”
The results so far from Hungary
For a while, Hungary’s policies looked like a clear triumph. Orban started introducing incentives about 15 years ago, just after Hungary’s population had fallen below 10 million for the first time in decades. Its fertility rate, 1.25, stood among the lowest in Europe. Over the following decade, global fertility plummeted even faster than demographers had anticipated. But Hungary defied the trend: By 2015, its fertility rate had climbed to 1.45. By 2021, 1.61.
Then, the direction reversed — all the way down to 1.39 by 2024, almost exactly the E.U. average.
That slide, coupled with uncertainty about what’s driving it and what comes next, has put Hungary’s program into contested territory. Some experts theorize that the incentives had simply encouraged people who already wanted babies to have them sooner. One recent commentary said bluntly that the program had “failed.” Eva Fodor, a Hungarian sociologist at Central European University, called the spending “electorally effective” for Orban, but “obscene” given its minimal gains.
“It doesn’t seem to be incentivizing people,” Fodor said.
But Hungary’s government has framed the program as a long-term play. The policies, over the past 15 years, have coincided with a rise in marriage rates and a decline in child poverty — all while the employment rate for women rose substantially.
Hanko, the culture minister, said Hungary probably won’t reach its stated goal of replacement-level fertility by 2030. But the difference of even a few decimal points matters substantially. Hungarian officials say the country already has 200,000 more children than it would have if fertility rates remained at 2010 levels. Over a century, in a country the size of Hungary, a fertility rate of, say, 1.6 versus 1.3 would swing the population by more than 1.5 million.
“What I think would be excellent is if, in the coming years, we could increase [the fertility rate] by 0.2. or 0.3,” Hanko said.
Academic studies paint a mixed picture about the efficacy of such efforts to jump-start baby booms. One-off payments tend to produce a short-lived effects. In South Korea, which has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, baby bonuses ended up going overwhelmingly to parents who’d been planning to have a child anyway, one study found. Other studies suggest that rates can be nudged up with a sustained programs that take on many social aspects, including child care and parental leave.
Hungary’s campaign is indeed sprawling. Hanko’s ministry prepared a document for The Washington Post with 16 pages of charts and policy descriptions.
But interviews with people in their 20s and 30s across Budapest suggest that these policies still haven’t addressed some of the biggest anxieties about child-raising.
Many described a push-pull in which the government focused on incentivizing childbirth while neglecting public systems that make family life viable. They cited the poor state of public education, and the pricey private alternatives, and a derelict public health system that few trust when children get sick. They also said the incentives that help young parents with home-buying have juiced the property market in Budapest, raising prices.
“I appreciate this aspect” of helping parents, said Hanna Keresztes, 24, a university student who hopes to have children one day. “But, at the same, I think they should improve other things. It’s not just enough to give parental aid.”
“They really motivate you to have kids. Until the point you have the child,” said Barbara Gyorke, 31. “If your life goes wrong, the system isn’t strong enough to support you.”
Most of the parents interviewed said they’d benefited from the money, especially the $30,000 loan — which turns into a gift for families with more than three kids. One mother said she used it to buy a home in the country. A father, Adam Petrezselyem, said the sum had helped offset some of the costs of upsizing apartments.
But then he sighed.
The costs of parenthood, he said, far outweigh incentives.
“It’s difficult in any country to have three children,” he said.
It was a Tuesday morning. He was at the park instead of working. His 5-year-old twins, sick and out of school, were chasing one another around the bushes. His baby was crying in a stroller filled with cracker crumbs.
Petrezselyem had done his part to help Hungary’s future. But the focus on childbirth was just a surface solution, he said, because now Hungary had a challenge, too.
It would have to create a country where his kids would want to stay.
Kamilla Marton contributed to this report.
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