For decades, cities throughout the world have based their mobility programmes on a misguided assumption: that car ownership will only keep growing. But as more cities challenge the auto-centric model and embrace “multimodality”, a new paradigm is emerging. Bringing about this alternative vision requires not only bold, innovative solutions, but also robust new planning institutions.

For many of us, having to juggle work, school, and other daily obligations, getting stuck in traffic is a daily nuisance. In order to carry out our responsibilities, we participate in the traffic system, which costs us a lot of time and money and harms our physical and mental health.

Some of these consequences, such as safety and stress, are easy to recognise. But research tells us that daily urban mobility also has a great impact on rates of obesity, diabetes, heart complaints, respiratory illnesses, dementia, and depression, amongst other health problems. These health conditions are also linked to common harmful transport emissions, such as particles resulting from the friction of tyres on asphalt, exhaust fumes, and general noise pollution created by vehicles. What’s more, traffic also causes greenhouse gas emissions, which are directly linked to the climate crisis and other related social and ecological problems.

In order to improve urban mobility and address its problems, modern cities put special care into the planning of their urban mobility systems. To this end, one of the main goals they aspire to is becoming a “multimodal” city – a place where inhabitants can choose and combine high-quality methods of mobility, and where owning and using a car is the last option, not a compulsion. This means prioritising more active forms of movement, such as walking and riding a bicycle, especially for journeys of only a few kilometres. For longer journeys around the city, the mobility system must offer a variety of complementary combinations using high-quality public transport, such as buses and trams for short journeys, and underground trains and regional train lines for longer trips and transporting large numbers of people.

In practice, however, many cities still struggle to establish effective new planning institutions to achieve this desired result due to a variety of reasons.

Firstly, following the influence of the North American urban planning paradigm, many cities in the previous century gave priority to private cars – by dedicating street space as well as setting aside large areas for car parks – instead of, say, green spaces. This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

Now, cities find themselves at a turning point between old and new paradigms of urban mobility planning. As the problems with the old system become clearer, a new paradigm is still developing and trying to find its way into practice. So far, it appears in cities that have been brave enough to leave behind old ways of thinking and create new, modern planning institutions. These cities, including Paris, Vienna, Helsinki, and Ljubljana, are leading by example. Although the emerging paradigm is not yet clearly defined, five main elements can often be found in their planning institutions.

This outdated planning approach assumed that the level of motorisation (i.e. the number of private cars per inhabitant) would increase and that, as a city’s population grew, more and more infrastructure would need to be dedicated to this very inefficient form of urban mobility.

The pillars of good planning

The first and most fundamental consideration in planning for multimodal cities is to have a far-reaching outlook. When it comes to urban mobility, even short-term interventions should follow long-term priorities. Taking a long-term view means considering possible future scenarios at least 20 years from now, and ideally even 30 to 50 years. Moreover, innovative thinking should be an inseparable part of this exercise to ensure that expectations of the future are not just a continuation of past trends. In concrete terms, this means we shouldn’t just assume that the rate of motorisation will grow, and that the number of cars on the road will increase as the population increases. Instead, cities must imagine alternative scenarios in which most journeys are made on foot, by bicycle, and by public transport. In other words, such a vision of the future must have citizens’ wellbeing at its heart.

This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. 

In addition, a strategic planning perspective requires understanding the difference between costs and investment. Changing public transport infrastructure (and especially rail) requires millions of euros in investment, but the investment is well worth it when it is considered over 50 or even 100 years’ time – its usual length of service.

A key insight in modern planning courses entails that land use is the first and most important public policy for urban mobility. This brings us to the second pillar of multimodal city planning: the integration of spatial planning into urban mobility as part of a wider package of public policies.

As soon as you have a beginning and end point for any planned movement, you are defining a mobility system. Therefore, to realise the desired vision of the city, the spatial plan and the urban mobility system must be closely connected. This means viewing public space as a whole and considering factors like population density, planned activities, land-use diversity, and the design of all elements that make up the streetscape.

Beyond these infrastructural considerations, an integrated plan must also address economic factors, such as how public transport services, as well as educational and medical infrastructure, will be paid for. In practice, this means public policy needs to consider a package of complementary measures: those that encourage walking, cycling, and public transport, as well as measures to discourage unnecessary car use. Here, complementarity also means measures which relate to other areas of public policy, such as education, health and employment systems.

The third element crucial in successful urban planning is having quality data about mobility systems for different groups of people. The basic idea taught in traffic management courses for decades is that cities must follow a digital-numerical model of urban transport systems. This enables the modelling of a series of steps – from how the need to move around develops to how movement equates to traffic flow on this or that street or line of public transport. A computer model like this is ideal for examining the complex consequences of different intervention packages, because it not only allows us to understand the problems that exist today, but also enables us to explore different future scenarios relatively cheaply. Urban mobility models should be built based on relevant data about people’s daily travel habits as well as their characteristics and desires. This kind of analysis is usually done through questionnaires that ask residents about their current and desired travel patterns.

That said, models and surveys are not enough on their own. A modern planning institution needs to collect large amounts of automatic data, as well as data that enables deeper analysis. One example would be information collected anonymously and automatically by smartphone, through analysis of telecommunication network signals or various applications using GPS or other telephone sensors. Another useful strategy would be collecting data about reasons for travel, such as attitudes and beliefs, as well as information about the characteristics of movement for particular groups of people – data obtainable only through carrying out surveys or interviews with the relevant population sample.

Perspective is key

You may have noticed that this text does not use the traditional term “traffic planning”, but instead talks about mobility planning. This is one of the important assumptions that a modern urban planning institute should have. The aim of planning is not to enable traffic flow or prevent traffic congestion. Those are important elements to consider, but the primary concern is creating a system that enables people to move around the city and gives them access to all the various activities a city can provide within a certain timeframe. This must apply to different types of people with different needs, constraints, and daily experiences of the transport system. Therefore – and this is the fourth pillar of good planning – evaluating different scenarios must include systemic perspectives as well as those of citizens themselves.

The city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

On the one hand, it is necessary to show with a model what the cumulative effects of any mobility infrastructure will be, for example in greenhouse gas emissions caused by the transport system, or the overall level of noise on one street. On the other hand, it is necessary to assess whether an alternative system can offer a functional and high-quality daily experience of mobility infrastructure. The model mentioned in the third pillar is a way to achieve this, but we can also use other methods. One of these solutions, which can be called the “person method,” evaluates mobility systems from the perspective of specific groups, such as children, older people without access to a car, or young parents with limited financial means.

It must be noted that high-quality planning focuses not solely on the content, but also on the infrastructure development process itself. The essence of a modern planning institution is a carefully considered process that develops through a series of clearly defined activities over time, with shared and clearly defined responsibilities for all participants. It is vital to include a range of experts, in addition to those who traditionally take part in urban mobility planning projects. For example, a high-quality process should include experts in regional economics, sociology, psychology, and the environment. What’s more, the city’s inhabitants themselves should be included in the planning process – not only at the end, when the alternatives are being evaluated, but already in the early stages, when alternative scenarios of the future are being created.

A planning process that explicitly includes different perspectives – the last of the five pillars – makes it possible to develop solutions that take into account citizens’ needs and experiences, rendering the various public policy measures more acceptable to them. Citizen participation itself can be organised using traditional methods, such as workshops and public hearings, as well as through modern digital tools like online questionnaires which use interactive maps. These tools provide valuable data, comments, and suggestions from citizens which can be directly linked to concrete locations in the city. Such an inclusive approach demands robust cooperation and entails constructive conflict between different values and assumptions about life in the city.

Towards a 21st-century paradigm

Cities have always changed and will continue to do so, along with humanity itself. New forms of mobility will appear in the transport system, as we have recently witnessed with the arrival of electric scooters on streets across the world. People’s habits will also change and diversify, leading to ever-increasing demands on urban mobility systems. Thanks to the rise of remote working, we are also seeing a change in people’s mobility habits.

Even though the majority of these and other aspects will remain extremely difficult to predict, one thing is certain: planning institutions need to change. They need to rise to the challenges of the 21st century in order to respect the needs of citizens as well as the environment. New institutions will also have to think carefully about how to invest in effective, applicable interventions that fulfil the desired objectives of new mobility paradigms. Only through the development of visionary and brave planning institutions can a city of wellbeing emerge.  

This article first appeared in Serbian in Omorika. It is republished here with permission. Translated by Alex Melbourne | Voxeurop 

In the face of the intersecting crises of demography, technology and economic insecurity, finding solidarity in the care we give each other offers a path to a more optimistic future. But working towards this requires us to challenge the foundational assumptions of the economy that surrounds us, one that devalues rather than celebrates the care we give each other.

The language of crisis defines our collective experience of the 21st century. As our attention is pulled from one emergency to another, we risk overlooking the mindsets that enable these shocks – not only the pursuit of extraction, growth, and profit, but also our collective relationship with care.  

Care shows up in all our lives – in parenting, foster care and paid care work; in receiving care, or being part of communities. At some point, we all need to care for others and be cared for ourselves. Yet care has been systematically undervalued and under-resourced as a result of those dominant mindsets.  

This isn’t a new issue. Unpaid care labour – particularly the assumption that it is labour carried out by women – is a foundational premise of our modern economy. While more women than ever taking up paid labour is a positive outcome of changing social norms, little has been done to reckon with the implications this has for unpaid care. Particularly as people live longer and Europe’s population shifts, the need for change becomes ever more pressing.  

That care has traditionally been women’s work only compounds the perception that it lacks value and due attention.

But doing so is at odds with an economy that only rewards profit and productivity as, statistically speaking, so much of the care we give to each other counts as neither. Social security systems and wider public services that sustain care have seen weakened investment and wealth extraction through privatisation.  

In England and Wales, research shows that those with a closer relationship to care – whether they receive or give, caring services more than the average person – are more at risk of experiencing poverty: children (31 per cent versus 21 per cent for the rest of the population), larger families (44 per cent of children in large families) disabled people (28 per cent, compared to 20 per cent for able-bodied people) and unpaid carers (23 per cent).  

Where the language of crisis sets off panic, solutions are presented in the form of quick fixes like further investment in AI and technology. From managing workflow to increasing accessibility and translations, predicting future need and remotely monitoring vital signs, there are clear uses for technological innovations across social care settings. But additional research shows that both the public and workers are wary of the impact of less human connection in care and healthcare settings. Whilst inserting new technology for the sake of productivity may in fact achieve the opposite – open up more time for human-led care – there is also a risk that this motivation reinforces existing attempts to minimise investment in human care and ignores the role of unpaid care in our lives. 

Rather than seeing care as another crisis to tackle at surface level, it should be seen as the driver of a shift for our economic model. Facing up to this reality will require us to reckon with the importance of care in our lives and to acknowledge different experiences of care as having more in common than divides them.  

How did we get here? 

Although European countries invest in care to differing degrees, the Europe-wide approach  is rooted in a shared ideology that sees care as either a burden or a deficit. Feminist economics shows that this ideology is inseparable from the logics of neoliberalism. As writer and academic Emma Dowling articulates, “care… is a cost to capital”, and it follows that this cost must be minimised. When economic success is measured according to GDP growth, any such cost is at odds with ideas of economic progress. Feminist economist Emma Holten lays bare the extent to which measures of economic progress and care are in conflict with one another: “[In] the eyes of GDP, taking care of a flock of kids and taking a nap are equivalent. Either way you are unproductive.” 

Whilst some argue we should factor care into GDP calculations in order to appreciate its value, this would merely align care with capitalism rather than engage with the bigger question of whether capitalism will enhance or degrade the quality of care. With a growing number of economists identifying GDP’s dominance over the economy as detrimental to wellbeing, greater ambition over the scale of change needed is essential. 

That care has traditionally been women’s work only compounds the perception that it lacks value and due attention. This gendered divide endures: women, for example, take on at least two and a half times more housework and care work than men globally – despite this being a socially created and maintained inequality. 

Overcoming these gendered and capitalist mindsets will require action across multiple fronts. Our research with grassroots activists whose work spans different relationships with care identified a range of opportunities to act in solidarity towards a more caring economy: in our communities, in the ways we work, and through the welfare state. 

Communities: Care by design 

In our communities, resisting capitalist framings requires us to work together to create a culture that celebrates care and enables it by design. How we design the places we live is one element of this. Conventionally, care is compartmentalised into specific policy spaces; often this means it is squeezed into the remit of health and social care systems. But for many people, care intersects with their lives in a much more comprehensive way.  

In Barcelona, care blocks offer an alternative way of thinking about how the places in which  we live influence our care for one another. The city has applied to care the principles of the commons (the idea that resources are shared and co-governed by their user community), and emboldened them with material resources and participatory local democratic processes in a municipalist approach. 

These care blocks sprang from Barcelona en Comu (BComu), a political platform that centred feminist economic thinking, reframing care as a public responsibility as opposed to a private issue. They started from a place whereby care is foundational and where those who are the providers of care are centred in policy decisions. Bringing together the many policy threads that impact those who undertake care labour at a local level moved the approach to care – crucially, by foregrounding its place in the city’s economy. 

BComu approached care holistically rather than in a compartmentalised way. Despite bureaucratic barriers, they supported care workers to set up cooperatives and worked to create the abovementioned care blocks whose goal was to enable small teams of workers to support a defined number of people in a fixed geographic location. Workers use a self-managing team model; they also have full-time contracts (as opposed to the more common zero-hours contracts, thereby mitigating economic insecurity), and a space to meet and plan their work. The intention is to improve labour conditions (including travel time between clients), improve the experience of beneficiaries of care, and create a more integrated service with wider health and social services. 

In addition, BComu is creating Centres of Care in these neighbourhoods bringing together a range of services for care workers and those undertaking unpaid care in a range of forms. It expanded its municipal children’s services to enable more women from low income families to undertake paid work. 

Whilst many of Barcelona’s individual initiatives may be familiar to other countries, their political philosophy of bringing different groups together, placing resources in one place, and using a local approach sets BComu’s work apart. By centring inequality and the recognition that “care work is everyone’s responsibility”, they have taken steps to address the devaluing of care in all its forms. 

Work: Rebalancing time 

How we spend our time also significantly impacts our ability to take on different caring relationships. The norms governing paid labour contain fertile ground for change. Across Europe, paid work is failing people with a relationship to care, from disabled people to unpaid carers and parents. The EU’s disability employment gap sat at 24 per cent in 2024, whilst in the UK it’s at around 30 per cent. Meanwhile, some 600 unpaid carers leave paid work every day in the UK alone. Our recent research into unpaid carers’ experiences of poverty exemplifies this, with one unpaid carer telling us, “I was a teacher, but [care] was taking all my evenings… so I’ve got a new job but it’s paying a lot less.” 

Discussions around paid work tend to converge on a vague commitment to flexible working or access to unpaid or low-paid leave for specific groups. Yet such targeted reforms do little to engage with the systems that have led to the norms we have today. Here, solidarity across caring experiences has the potential to embolden campaigns to drive care’s recognition as a collective experience that are currently compartmentalised. Take paid leave. In the UK, different campaigners are working to increase paid sick leave, statutory paternity leave, and paid carers leave. Each of these is an act of rebalancing our paid labour with our wider lives, and any such campaign must speak to the underlying mindsets that devalue care for ourselves and each other.  

Moving from compartmentalised action to transformative change speaks to the increasing recognition in new economic thinking, rooted in feminist economics, that we must recognise the role unpaid care plays in our economy and the need to shift our paid labour model to value and enable care. A more systemic rebalancing of time is needed. 

This year will mark a century since the five-day work week was adopted by the Ford Motor Company, a significant win after a long campaign by unions. A decade prior to this, the average work week was between 50 and 60 hours. Since 1926, average working hours have plateaued, currently standing at 37.5 for women and 39 for men. 

There is growing interest and evidence for a move to a four-day work week, with pilots undertaken globally. Rebalancing the amount of time we spend in paid labour, without loss of pay, is a crucial way to centre care in our lives. In Poland, the government announced a pilot for a shorter working week in 2025 to address some of the longest working hours in Europe. Employers can voluntarily test a flexible approach to shorter working hours, either by reducing daily working hours, increasing the weekend by one day, or providing more annual leave, all whilst maintaining salaries. The pilot received four times the anticipated sign-ups from employers, with over 2000 companies currently undertaking a trial. 

In Germany, 45 organisations were recruited for a two-year pilot to trial a four-day work week, whilst in the UK, a further 61 trialled the same over six months. Across different contexts, results show that productivity improves (an obvious priority for employers), opening space for a better relationship with care. Improvements in wellbeing are also significant, with sick days declining and employees reporting a reduction in stress. 

Social security: Towards universalism 

The social security system is another essential pillar for a more flexible approach to paid work. For those whose caring role means that paid work is not possible, or is limited, the system should provide enough support to live well without having to minimise that care. 

In Europe, improvements in living conditions, shifting attitudes to illness and disability, and innovations in healthcare have meant more of us live longer. Countries have responded to this in different ways, with different degrees of investment in social security and social care. However, the vast majority of care is still provided by family and friends, much of it unpaid. 

In the 1970s, the UK introduced the Invalid Care Allowance (now Carer’s Allowance) for single people caring for a disabled family member. The allowance is now available to all people over 18 who are not in full-time education and are providing care for 35 hours or more a week. There are challenges with the UK model, not least its low payment level, but we can look to it as a starting point for considering how we value and enable those providing unpaid care.  

The idea that our social security systems are there to support our different relationships with care opens up the possibility of more universal provision too. Whilst payments for unpaid carers – and for disabled people who face extra costs – are essential to ensure everyone is able to live well, there is also a case to be made for a universal basic income (UBI) that overcomes the need for boundaries and thresholds around what counts as care. Any model would need to account for the additional costs faced by disabled people in an ableist society, but a foundation of UBI could go some way to enabling care in all our lives. 

Moving from compartmentalised action to transformative change speaks to the increasing recognition in new economic thinking, rooted in feminist economics…

A long road ahead 

Whilst UBI is a longer road, we are seeing early shifts across Europe towards a rebalancing of paid and unpaid labour, towards places designed around care that could enable us all to live well. As a care-experienced collaborator told us of a caring future, it “is imbued with the principles of love, care and freedom for all…we have an obligation to keep that alive and flourishing, to demand a multitude of futures that aren’t eschatological and annihilistic.” Embracing that care is a collective experience, and using that knowledge to act together, in solidarity, to change the mindsets that shape our economy is a source of hope. 

The era of globalisation was built on cheap and abundant labour. That era is now ending. As falling birth rates and longer lives shrink the working-age population, tighter labour markets will become the new normal – but what follows is not predetermined. Through collective bargaining and a renewed focus on care, workers can turn demographic change into an opportunity for redistribution and greater equality. 

“Prediction is difficult – particularly when it involves the future.” This maxim, commonly attributed to Mark Twain, is often used to remind economists of the limits of their models and conjectures. Yet for slow-moving trends like demographic change, society is better positioned to make forecasts, potentially allowing foresight to both shape outcomes and foster resilience. In Europe and globally, a long-running demographic transformation is unfolding, with declining working-age populations and a growing elderly population set to become defining features of the 21st century. The fertility rate – the average number of children born to a woman over her lifespan – has, over the last 40 years, fallen below the replacement level (2.1), stabilising at approximately 1.4 in the EU in the 1990s. At the same time, mortality has decreased due to medical advancements, increased occupational health and safety standards, and healthier lifestyles. Today, life expectancy at birth is over 80 years in Europe – 10 years higher than in the 1970s. The overall result is that fewer children are being born, but people are living longer. Taking into account net migration to the EU, which has averaged around one million per year since the 2000s, Eurostat expects the population to remain stable at 450 million through to 2050 (not accounting for EU enlargement).

One of the biggest shifts underway is in the working-age population (those between 20 and 64). In the baseline scenario, the mean age in Europe is expected to rise from 43.5 to 47 by 2050. This is due to both low fertility rates and lower mortality, with the two factors combining to increase the number of people over 65 from 21 to 29 per cent of the population total (indeed, those aged 85 and over are expected to double in number, from 3 to 6 per cent). The result is that the working-age population will decline from 59 to 53 per cent of the total. To view it another way, by 2050, there will be 26 million fewer people in the working-age demographic. Putting both developments together, the old-age dependency ratio is projected to shift from 3:1 to 2:1. This means that there will soon be just two people of working age for every one person over 65.  

Particularly strong declines in the working age population are expected in Eastern and Southern Europe, where fertility rates have been especially low, and where emigration to other parts of the EU has accelerated demographic trends. (This is seen most clearly in Eastern Europe.) Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, as well as Greece and Portugal, are all faced with a decline in the working-age population of over 20 per cent, according to these projections. Conversely, immigration is set to boost this age group in Malta, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, and Belgium, some of which have also benefitted from a less severe decline in fertility rates.  

Positive shock

As economists Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan observe in The Great Demographic Reversal (2020), what characterised the era of globalisation starting in the 1970s and 1980s was a positive labour market shock: large cohorts of baby boomers in Europe and North America entered the globalised labour market, followed by Eastern European workers after the fall of the Soviet Union and China’s workforce following the country’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The combined effect was to make labour cheap and abundant. These demographic developments have been reversing since the 2010s, and many emerging economies are following trajectories similar to those described for Europe. The global population is expected to peak before the end of the century. Today, population growth is concentrated in a few parts of the world, including India and sub-Saharan Africa. However, workers in these regions remain, for the time being, less integrated into global production. In economic terms, Goodhart and Pradhan argue that smaller workforces will stunt GDP growth.

A recent ILO working paper estimates that the demographic drag in the baseline employment rate scenario will cause European growth to be 0.25 per cent lower annually up to 2050. Furthermore, the smaller workforce will be met with high consumption demand from older households spending their lifetime savings, increasing scarcity, inflationary pressure, and tightening labour markets.

Reversing the reversal?

As with any projection, there is a degree of uncertainty. Barring catastrophic wars or plagues, there are two main factors that could, in theory, halt the demographic reversal or its consequences in Europe: migration and labour market mediation. With regard to the first, immigrants are, on average, considerably younger than the native-born population, and migration could therefore grow the labour force and reduce old-age dependency. However, migration is the most uncertain element in the demographic projection. It is also, quantitatively speaking, the smallest. In 2024, there were 4.8 million deaths and 3.6 million births in the EU; net migration was, on average, around 1 million per year. Even significantly higher migration would not, therefore, stop Europe’s ageing. Even with a 30 per cent increase in net migration above the baseline projection, the working-age population would still decrease from 262 million to 249 million. For reference, the baseline projection for 2050 currently stands at 236 million.  

Net migration would need to be sustained at levels higher than 50 per cent compared to previous years if the working-age population is to stabilise and even higher to stabilise dependency ratios. With countries such as China and Brazil increasingly competing with Europe and elsewhere for immigrants, these levels are implausible. Moreover, even if they could be achieved, such large inflows of migrants into Europe would likely overwhelm administrative capacities and public provisioning – and, most likely, go against public sentiment. These are all decisive factors for the successful integration of migrants into the labour market. Migration and demography scholars come to substantially similar assessments.¹

This does not mean that immigration will not be key to mitigating demographic risks. Migrants perform essential work in short-staffed and critical fields such as logistics, food (processing), industry, and healthcare. The shortages of seasonal farm workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, or of truck drivers after Brexit, are a stark reminder of this. Realistic migration scenarios, however, cannot reverse the shrinking workforce, much less stop oldage dependency ratios from skewing further.  

On the second factor, demographic dependency does not directly translate into economic dependency, as this relationship is mediated through the labour market. The labour market determines the proportion of people who receive money from social protection systems (such as elderly people and those who contribute money to them (such as workers). This, in turn, determines economic dependency. Combatting unemployment and promoting labour force participation decreases old-age dependency. For instance, model calculations show that the combined effects of high employment and high migration could reduce the increase in old-age economic dependency by more than 50 per cent in Germany and Austria.²

Structural changes in the corporate landscape will, however, require unions to expand beyond their traditional strongholds

Policies can go a long way towards achieving this outcome. For example, increasing the compatibility of work and family by expanding public infrastructure, offering longer parental and care leave, and combatting gender-based discrimination, such as the gender wage gap, could increase women’s participation in the labour force. Adapting workplaces and promoting flexible working hours could meanwhile encourage older workers to remain on the job for longer or transition into retirement more gradually. Lastly, easier skills recognition, equal treatment, and good work standards would boost migrant participation in the labour market.  

However, the bottom line remains that even if migration is well managed and labour force participation rates are boosted, this would only moderate – not reverse – the demographic trend towards increased old-age dependency.  

Employment, investment, and productivity

The demographic projection is that for every person turning 65, the number of people turning 20 will decline from 0.83 to 0.77 by 2050. As the cohorts exiting the labour market are larger than the ones joining, the labour market should tighten. The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) forecasts labour shortages across the skills spectrum by 2035.³ Professionals, service workers, elementary occupations, plant and machine operators, and assemblers are all forecast to have a “type 3” shortage on a fourpoint scale. Labour shortages and vacancies going unfilled have been on the rise since the 2008 global financial crisis.

For European workers, labour shortages will have two effects: first, greater inflationary pressure due to production bottlenecks and intensified – and often longer – working hours in the impacted sectors; second, increased bargaining power, especially as the declining working-age populations combine with rising geopolitical tensions to restrict the attractiveness of outsourcing options. 

On investment, the picture is concerning. With demographic shifts implying lower growth, higher labour costs, more transfers to pensioners, and elderly households spending lifetime savings, raising investment will become more challenging. Moreover, higher central bank rates in response to inflation may compound this dynamic, driving up interest rates and thus investment costs. Continued and accelerating productivity growth is the bedrock for rising living standards and decent work and provides scope for wage increases while easing fiscal and welfare funding concerns. This high-road strategy, which does not focus solely on cost-cutting and deskilling, is what creates high-wage jobs, competition based on quality and the value of craftsmanship, and the retention of workers at a company level. Productivity growth, however, is stagnating, and the demographic drag on GDP could lead to a shrinking EU economy, intensifying distributional contestation. In his 2024 report, former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi identified stagnating productivity as the major hurdle to European competitiveness.  

One major impediment to investment is that corporate profits are being increasingly retained instead of reinvested.⁴ Workers’ voices could play a major role in changing this reality, as greater employee participation in decision-making increases investment and the productivity growth of firms, which is necessary for the green and digital transitions.⁵ Workers mitigate shareholders’ tendency to focus on short-term returns (which often causes underinvestment).  

Crises and opportunities for workers  

For trade unions, this combination of tighter labour markets and higher inflation could act as a tailwind for renewal. Unions have faced declining membership in most countries due to factors such as a fall in manufacturing employment, outsourcing, the rise of atypical employment practices, and employer strategies. However, trade union density (the percentage of employees who are union members) has recently begun to stabilise in some countries, including Ireland, France, Spain, Lithuania, Romania, and Norway.⁶ In the past, trade unions have been able to organise more successfully in tighter labour markets, thereby increasing worker leverage, and in contexts of high inflation, by protecting real wages. This might become the case again in the new demographic reality.  

Structural changes in the corporate landscape will, however, require unions to expand beyond their traditional strongholds in large manufacturing firms and the public sector, reaching into commercial services and smaller workplaces, where employment is growing rapidly. In addition, atypical forms of employment, such as subcontracting and platform-mediated gig work, are also becoming more prevalent. Successful expansion campaigns that also reach into these sectors will be necessary for the revitalisation process.  

The care sector will be particularly strategic in this regard. As the proportion of elderly people in society increases, so will the share of goods and services required for their care. Thirty-seven per cent of women and 29 per cent of men above the age of 85 have severe activity limitations and require assistance to perform daily activities. Dementia in particular puts pressure on the sector because it increases care needs without reducing life expectancy. Due to the complex social skills required for taking care of elderly people much of this work is unlikely to be meaningfully automated, necessitating a build-up of the care sector, where labour shortages are already visible.⁷  

Care work is often performed informally by relatives, predominantly women. However, informal care work reduces women’s employment opportunities, contradicting the goal of expanding labour force participation to mitigate demographic pressures. As for the formal care sector, it is currently characterised by low pay and strong gender segregation. Good working conditions are necessary to attract more care workers and ensure the dignity of the ageing population. This puts society in a dilemma, as at the same time, fiscal constraints exist. Unions could play an important role here by fighting for better working conditions and organising workers. Such care sector campaigns could be an essential element in trade union renewal. They could also integrate the broader perspective of workers gained through social dialogue and consultation, thereby playing an essential role in shaping this key sector in an ageing society.  

The demographic outlook for the 21st century comes with considerable challenges for Europe: low growth, high old-age dependency, labour shortages, inflation pressures, and a gloomy outlook for investments and the care sector. At the same time, this constellation may enhance organised labour’s capability to revitalise and navigate these challenges to the benefit of working people. 

1. See, for example: Hein de Haas (2024). How Migration Really Works: 22 Things You Need to Know about the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Penguin. Simona Bignami et al. (2024). “Low Fertility in the EU: A Review of Trends and Drivers”. Science for Policy Brief, No. JRC137492. Brussels: European Commission Joint Research Centre. Available at <https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC137492>.  ︎
2. For Austria, see: Josef Wöss & Erik Türk (2014). “Demografie und Sozialstaat: Arbeitsmarkt hat zentrale Bedeutung”. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Vol. 40(3), pp. 429–443. Available at <https://www.arbeiterkammer.at/infopool/wien/Demographie_und_Sozialstaat_-_WuG_3-2014.pdf>. 
   For Germany, see: Erik Türk et al. (2018). “Den demografischen Wandel bewältigen: Die Schlüsselrolle des Arbeitsmarktes”. IMK Report, No. 137.  
   Düsseldorf: Institut für Makroökonomie und Konjunkturforschung (IMK). Available at <https://www.imk-boeckler.de/de/faust-detail.htm?sync_id=HBS-006858>.  ︎
3. Cedefop (2025). Cedefop Labour and Skills Shortage Index. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Available at <https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/a29414ce-e900-11ef-b5e9-01aa75ed71a1/language-en>. ︎
4. Peter Chen, Loukas Karabarbounis & Brent Neiman (2017). “The Global Rise of Corporate Saving”. Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 89, pp. 1–19. Available at <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2017.03.004>. ︎
5. Stan De Spiegelaere & Sigurt Vitols (2026). “Worker Participation: A Missing Element on the Road to Competitiveness”. ETUI Policy Brief, 2, 2026. Brussels: European Trade Union Institute. Available at <https://www.etui.org/publications/worker-participation-missing-element-road-competitiveness>. ︎
6. Agnieszka Piasna et al. (eds) (2026). Benchmarking Working Europe 2026. Brussels: European Trade Union Institute & European Trade Union Confederation. Available at <https://www.etui.org/sites/default/files/2026-04/ETU%20BM2026-WEB.pdf>. ︎
7. Cedefop (2025) ︎

Children bear the consequences of today’s major crises more than most, yet their concerns and experiences remain largely invisible in political life. A childist revolution calls for transforming the political space to cultivate a deeper sense of our social and natural interdependence – including fully democratising democracies through ageless suffrage. 

Democracies face crises when populations lose confidence in their ability to address fundamental concerns – as is usually the case in periods of rapid industrialisation, runaway inequality, economic depression, mass migration, and war. During such times, they often backslide into authoritarian appeals, but tend eventually to evolve new democratic norms and practices. 

The worldwide crisis of democracy today revolves around issues that centrally concern one of the most disempowered social groups: the third of humanity who are children. It is children above all who face the greatest impacts of climate change, both immediately and in the long term. Children in rich and poor countries alike suffer disproportionate poverty because of global neoliberalism. Young people die in outsized numbers from civilian-targeted modern warfare and terrorism. And they are hit hardest by the ways that new digital technologies manipulate information and foster technological addiction. 

However, children remain largely invisible in political life. Indeed, it is this very invisibility that keeps children’s issues at the margins of democratic policymaking.  

The rise of childism 

The past couple of decades have seen the rise of a movement among academics and activists to respond to these democratic and childhood realities under the umbrella of childism. Childism is a critical approach to societies similar to feminism, anti-racism, decolonialism, and the like. It seeks to empower children and acknowledge their concerns and experiences by transforming historically ingrained assumptions and structures. Its aim is to reconstruct social norms to make them genuinely age-inclusive. 

The word “childism” was coined in the early 2000s in academic literature rooted in the then-emerging field of childhood studies, which seeks to understand children’s agency and experiences as children rather than as developing adults. In the 1990s, the term was used briefly in literary studies to refer to a practice of reading like a child. More recently, it has also been used in a negative sense, akin to sexism and racism. But the predominant meaning in scholarship – and now also in social activism – is in its positive sense of children’s empowerment. 

The central problem that childism addresses is a deeply rooted adultism: the assumption that the adult is the measure of the human. Adultism is the often forgotten side of patriarchy, the historical power of the “pater” or father, which is not only gendered but also aged. Like sexism, adultism is deeply embedded in our histories, cultures, and languages. Adultism in particular asserts a binary opposition between supposedly rational and independent adults on the one hand, and supposedly irrational and dependent children on the other. In this way, it divides social relations in everything from families and communities to human rights and law. 

 Adultism is the often forgotten side of patriarchy, the historical power of the “pater” or father, which is not only gendered but also aged.

Children themselves are already practising an implicit childism. Young climate protesters are demanding age inclusivity in environmental policy. Child labour union activists are calling for recognition for non-adult work. Youth are fighting for schools free of gun violence. Transgender children are pushing their communities to change how they think about gender identity. Children and youth in the dozens of countries with child and youth parliaments are pressing for children’s perspectives on safe streets, access for people with disabilities, and education reform. 

Children’s suffrage 

As marginalised groups over history have found, however, the ultimate right to political inclusion is the right to vote. Suffrage does not solve all problems, but it does confer on those possessing it the status of first-class citizens with equal political dignity. It is the right to participate in the process of forming rights. This is why non-landowners, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and women fought so hard to achieve it. And it is why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights call, without any type of qualification, for “universal and equal suffrage”.  

Children have been fighting for suffrage since at least the 1990s. They have done so in campaigns and legal action by groups like We Want the Vote and KRÄTZÄ in Germany, the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) in the US, Young Pirates of Europe (YPE), and Green Youth. Adults have joined them with academic and policy support, including through initiatives like the Children’s Voting Colloquium, Amnesty International UK, the Freechild Institute, the National Association of Large Families , and the Child Rights International Network (CRIN). What is more, children and adults have sued governments for ageless suffrage in Germany, California and Massachusetts in the United States, Sweden, and Canada.

The childist argument for ageless suffrage is that it is necessary for the wellbeing of both children and democracies. Children themselves would finally have their lives and perspectives taken just as seriously by policymakers, whose jobs would no longer rely solely on pressure from adults. And democracies would benefit from the full range of the people’s ideas, thus making better-informed decisions. 

A matter of competence?  

The main objection to children’s suffrage has historically been that children lack voting competence. People under the age of maturity are thought to be deficient in democratic thinking skills, knowledge, and independence, and to be too open to manipulation. And they are presumed to lack the experience and understanding needed to contribute to difficult decisions about complex political matters like war, health policy, and immigration. 

But these presumptions misunderstand both democracy and childhood. Working backwards from the aims of democracy, voting competence consists in the ability to give voice to political views. The purpose of democratic voting is not to place decisions in the hands of those with certain types of knowledge, but to hold elected representatives accountable to the people impacted by their decisions. Anyone should be included in the vote who wishes to have a say in what policymakers may do. 

Barring children from voting is, in reality, a form of systemic discrimination. It holds them to a standard of voting competence that is not applied to the rest of the population.

If voting competence is properly understood, children have much more of it – and adults much less – than commonly thought. It is hard to deny democratic capacities to the millions of children who march for climate change policies, fight against racism, or participate in children’s parliaments, child labour unions, or any number of other political organisations. Children worldwide discuss politics at the dinner table, read or watch the news, and hold diverse opinions about current events. There is no magical stage of neurological development at which the capacity to have political views suddenly arises. It is a general capacity of anyone aware of their larger world. 

This capacity of children to participate in democratic life is already legally recognised in Articles 12, 13, and 15 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. These guarantee children the rights to “express [their] views freely in all matters affecting the child”, “freedom of expression” without unnecessary restriction, and “freedom of association”. All of these rights are violated when children are banned from exercising their democratic capacities. 

Likewise, adults exhibit very wide ranges of democratic skill, knowledge, and susceptibility to influence. Adults have the right to vote regardless of ignorance, thoughtlessness, and openness to manipulation. They retain this right even if they suffer from severe cognitive impairment, mental disability, or dementia. History shows that adults frequently make terrible voting decisions. Furthermore, no adult has a deep understanding of all the matters they must vote upon, from economic statistics to military capacities, health innovations, top secret information, legal precedents, and much else. 

Barring children from voting is, in reality, a form of systemic discrimination. It holds them to a standard of voting competence that is not applied to the rest of the population. The European Court of Human Rights defines discrimination as “differential treatment in comparable situations without an objective or reasonable justification”. Adult-only voting excludes children as a class of citizens for reasons outside the objective requirements of voting itself. 

Stronger democracies 

But the most important reason to give children the right to vote is that it would improve life for children and adults and strengthen democracies.  

Children themselves would live in political environments that are required to take their interests into account centrally instead of peripherally. Currently, they cannot vote politicians out of office, which means authorities are not truly incentivised to take children’s experiences and concerns seriously. Children may be objects of democratic beneficence, but like adults, they also need to be treated as subjects with democratic agency.  

If children could vote, they would likely pressure politicians, for example, to finally take the climate emergency seriously, fight child poverty, regulate digital media, invest in meaningful education reform, attend to lifelong healthcare, and create safer streets and greener spaces. They would also have greater recourse to fight social discrimination, such as social media bans, age curfews, exclusion from divorce proceedings, corporal punishment, school discipline, issues with access to medical care, and much more. 

Granting children the right to vote would also benefit adults. Everyone would gain from better climate policies. Parents would be helped by children’s greater economic support. Teachers would be empowered by education policies that better respond to children’s actual lives and experiences. Doctors would find greater resources for child healthcare and research. And business leaders would hire from a better-educated workforce.  

Moreover, democracy itself would be strengthened by becoming more fully responsive to the people’s actual lives. Policymakers would find themselves equally beholden to all instead of just some of their constituents. Democratic leaders could make clearer decisions with – so to speak – a third more pixels added to their policymaking screen. And democracies would make choices about war, spending, and judicial reform in more inclusively informed ways. 

What is more, children’s suffrage could provide the needed antidote to today’s slide of democracies into authoritarianism. The right to vote for all would undercut the assumption that some are natural rulers over others. And it would eliminate the problem of citizens spending the first quarter of their lives being told that their views do not count, which opens citizens to simplistic authoritarian appeals. Instead of looking to father figures, democracies would more likely turn to broad-minded defenders of human rights. 

Children may be objects of democratic beneficence, but like adults, they also need to be treated as subjects with democratic agency.  

Systemic inclusion 

Childism calls for not only new understandings of voting rights but also new electoral practices. Suffrage movements typically shift how voting actually takes place. We have come a long way from landowning men choosing representatives in taverns.  

A good first step is to lower the voting age. In countries that have lowered the national voting age to 16, children have been shown to turn out in higher numbers for elections than young adults and to retain higher voting rates into adulthood. They have also moved policymakers to include more child-friendly interests. However, from a childist perspective, lowering voting ages does not go far enough. It still only enfranchises children who are thought to have achieved adult-like competencies, whereas genuine democracies need to move beyond adultism. 

There are several different proposals for ageless voting rights, but my own is for what I call proxy-claim voting. Under this proposition, all citizens would have a proxy vote from birth to death, which can be used by their legal guardian – a parent, caretaker, or next of kin. This proxy vote would most likely be used on behalf of infants, young children, cognitively impaired children and adults, adults with significant disabilities or health issues, and elderly persons with dementia. But all citizens would, at the same time, have the right to claim the exercise of their vote on their own behalf. Whenever a citizen desired to vote independently, regardless of their age or condition, they could claim their right to do so. 

Some might object that a proxy-claim right to vote would advantage larger families, but in reality, it would advantage the children themselves in these families who deserve their own equal representation. Others might find proxy voting fundamentally undemocratic, yet it already exists in most countries for impaired (or even just travelling) adults, so why not also for the youngest children? Some do not think voting is all that powerful anyway, but is it fair or just to ban one group even from the choice to participate? 

Childism calls for children’s systemic inclusion and empowerment. It suggests, just like first-wave feminism, that the right to vote is a fundamental human right. But suffrage is only a first step. Childism sets in motion a systemic critique of societies’ adultistic biases across law, policy, culture, and family. It insists that children are not second-class citizens but central to infusing societies with humanity. 

Efforts to boost Hungarian birth rates date back centuries, but the pronatalist agenda gained new momentum under Viktor Orbán. Introduced in 2010, his “family-friendly governance” attacked women’s self-determination and equality, but recent political developments bring hope. A look at the past – and to the future – of demographic policy in Hungary.

“If you don’t own a home, it’s very hard… renting is extremely expensive, especially with utilities on top. My partner and I tried to work it out. If we lived by ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to make ends meet. If we wanted to maintain our standard of living and provide everything for our child, it just wouldn’t be possible. By the third month, we’d already need to take out a loan and go into debt. That’s how it would go, which is why we live with my mother in her house.”¹

In 2018, a young woman from Dombóvár in southwestern Hungary spoke for many when she opened up about her life in the country under then-prime minister Viktor Orbán. Skyrocketing living costs and low wages in rural areas made cohabitation with family members often the only viable path to starting adult life and having children.

Curiously, a range of generous grants, benefits, and tax breaks was available to families with children and couples planning to start a family under the Orbán regime, particularly from 2015 onwards.

These measures belonged to a series of population policy initiatives aimed at triggering a baby boom in Hungary. However, experts raised concerns about their fairness, sustainability, and accessibility. Many key instruments, including tax credits and refunds, strongly favoured high-income married couples. Those who did not align with the regime’s preferred model of the ideal white Christian Hungarian nuclear family, such as non-heterosexual and non-married couples, as well as less well-off couples and families, were marginalised. The country’s Roma minority, who experience higher rates of poverty and exclusion, was disproportionately affected. Babylinked housing subsidies contributed to rising property prices and rents – pushing younger generations towards alternative housing arrangements.

Furthermore, even when young couples were able to take advantage of these financial incentives, this often triggered an ethical paradox.² While they used these schemes to realise plans they already had, many expressed moral unease about having children at a particular time to qualify for state support. As a result, family subsidies became a site of tension and moral negotiation among citizens.

But the most serious concern surrounding this policy direction – ostensibly taken in response to fears over demographic decline in Hungary – was its effect on women, specifically their reproductive autonomy, economic independence, and equality.

Historical roots of the demographic panic

Fears of depopulation have long shaped Hungarian demographic discourse, with experts and politicians repeatedly invoking the spectre of national decline. Although circumstances have changed over the centuries, these narratives have remained remarkably consistent. In modern Hungarian historiography, concerns about demographic decline are often traced back to the aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Trianon (1920), which drastically redrew Hungary’s borders. Since then, politicians, journalists, and demographers have repeatedly sounded the alarm over national survival.

Fears of depopulation have long shaped Hungarian demographic discourse, with experts and politicians repeatedly invoking the spectre of national decline.

During the interwar, authoritarian Horthy regime, a maternalist framework came to dominate public discourse. From 1928 onwards, women with many children were awarded the Medal of Merit for Valiant Mothers, and comprehensive social policies were introduced to support the agrarian population, particularly large but impoverished families. However, these policies increasingly relied on the confiscation of so-called “Jewish wealth” from the late 1930s onward,³ while disqualifyIng people of Jewish origin from the welfare cooperatives that distributed assistance, giving them a distinctly exclusionary and discriminatory character. The loan-based schemes that were introduced, under which families were exempted from repaying state loans upon the birth of a fourth child, bear a striking resemblance to family policies introduced in the 2010s.

After World War II, a Moscow-backed communist regime was established in Hungary, yet the maternalist framework persisted. In the early 1950s, the state launched a strict anti-abortion campaign, tightening regulations to the point of near prohibition.⁴ At the same time, social benefits for mothers were expanded. Pronatalist discourse continued to draw on longstanding fears of depopulation, though its ideological foundation shifted: higher birth rates were now framed as essential to building the ideal communist society.

The third distinct phase of the twentieth century emerged in the 1970s, when the state socialist regime initiated another demographic campaign. Much like the pronatalist discourse of the interwar years, this approach linked population growth to broader social and economic prosperity. It primarily focused on financial support via a new “childcare allowance” (gyermekgondozási segély, GYES) in 1967. The GYES offered women the opportunity – but also subjected them to the implicit social pressure – to stay at home with their children for the first three years of their lives, supported by limited state compensation. Other measures included the development of healthcare infrastructure and conscious family planning, as well as the re-regulation of strict state committees to review applications for abortion.

Orbán’s illiberal contract with women

While there were sustained challenges to women’s reproductive rights and autonomy from conservative and religious actors following the fall of communism in 1989, it was only after 2010 that a distinctly neo-conservative reproductive regime took shape. In its early years, the emphasis was on material incentives – for instance, families with three or more children benefitted from significant tax reductions, signalling a shift in the country’s approach to social citizenship. The introduction of the Family Housing Subsidy scheme (Családi Otthonteremtési Kedvezmény, CSOK) in 2015 further strengthened the pronatalist direction of population policy by offering families with children financial assistance with buying a home. Beyond demographic goals, these initiatives also aimed to stimulate consumption and give a boost to the construction sector.

The year 2018 marked a further turning point. Following his third consecutive electoral victory, Orbán declared it the “Year of the Families” and, in 2019, launched the Family Protection Action Plan (Családvédelmi Akcióterv). This programme expanded financial incentives, including the “baby-expecting” loan (babaváró hitel), mortgage reductions tied to the birth of children, and lifetime income tax exemptions for mothers of four or more children. According to Orbán, having children is “the most personal public matter”, a framing that reinforces a maternalist narrative in which women are primarily defined through motherhood and provide a service to the state by bearing and raising citizens.

The illiberal “carefare regime”⁵ promoted paid, full-time motherhood as an alternative to participation in the labour market, presenting this arrangement as an attractive option for women. At the same time, it oversaw the privatisation of public services, including healthcare and education, implicitly relying on women’s reproductive labour as a low-cost substitute for state provision. For their part, working women were expected to perform both productive and reproductive labour to maximise state benefits. This process of “housewifisation” functioned as a distinctive – and ultimately largely ineffective – response to broader economic and social challenges.

A further feature of Orbán’s pronatalist drive was the tightening of access to abortion. In 2011, a clause was introduced into the Hungarian constitution that enshrined the protection of life from conception. While this did not result in the criminalisation of abortion, it set the tone for the years to come. Due to “sneaking restrictions” including the outlawing of medical abortion in 2012, the need for self-financing, and increasing bureaucratic and psychological pressure – exacerbated by the controversial “heartbeat decree” introduced in 2022 that obliges doctors to provide pregnant women seeking an abortion with “a clearly identifiable indication of fetal vital signs” before going ahead with a termination –, women under Orbán faced many barriers that made it very difficult to access the procedure.⁶

The illiberal “carefare regime” promoted paid, full-time motherhood as an alternative to participation in the labour market, presenting this arrangement as an attractive option for women.

Consequences of the campaign

Over the past sixteen years, enormous amounts of public money have been spent on the pronatalist ambitions of policymakers in Hungary. At times, family support reached around 5 per cent of GDP. Meanwhile, the associated tax benefits have increased year on year.

Despite the money spent, the anticipated baby boom never really arrived, and demographic trends remained largely unchanged. According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office,⁷ in 1998, the number of live births in Hungary was 97,301. After Orbán’s return to power in 2010, birth rates lay at just over 90,000 and stagnated until 2013. This was followed by a brief increase between 2014 and 2017, with a high of just over 93,000 recorded in 2016.

Many of these births were not additional but rather brought forward from future years, echoing the short-term effects of pronatalist campaigns of the 1950s. Following the 2016 high, birth rates fell slightly and then remained relatively stable for a number of years before declining sharply from 2022 onwards. In 2025, Hungary recorded the lowest number of live births in its history, suggesting that the downward trend may be difficult to reverse, particularly if structural challenges remained unaddressed. These include the declining number of women of childbearing age and the continued emigration of young people to Western Europe in search of higher living standards and happier lives.

But while the influence of Orbán’s pronatalist policies on birth rates was ultimately negligible, their impact on women was significant, with increased risks of impoverishment, domestic and obstetric violence, economic dependency, inequality in employment, and the gradual tightening of reproductive rights and decision-making autonomy.

The clearest impact can be seen in the area of reproductive rights. The number of pregnancy terminations has decreased significantly, from approximately 40,000 in 2010 to just over 20,000 in 2024. However, this trend should not be interpreted as a direct result of tighter abortion regulations; it is more reasonably explained by factors such as increased contraceptive use and more conscious family planning, and it has continued independently of legal restrictions. Therefore, fewer women are seeking abortions, but access to the procedure has also become more difficult, particularly affecting young and low-income women, who are more likely to rely on abortion as a last resort for family planning.⁸

Meanwhile, the rate of caesarean sections rose from 38.46 per cent in 2015 to 41.59 per cent in 2024, which Hungarian women’s health campaigners consider to be one manifestation of widespread obstetric violence.⁹ Added to this is the fact that rural obstetric departments have been closing down due to the declining birth rate and the brain drain of medical personnel, while the lack of general practitioners and school nurses is noticeable in everyday life, causing worrying gaps in care.

Another illustration of the effect government policies have had on women’s ability to make life choices free from coercion was a dramatic spike in marriages, peaking in 2021.¹⁰ Within marriages, these policies reinforced traditional gender roles and women’s economic dependency, with higher earning men more able to take advantage of tax breaks without getting involved in child-rearing.

In relation to employment inequality, the (up to) three-year leave period associated with the GYES childcare allowance has generated tensions, not only between employers and employees but also among women themselves. Extended absences for family reasons – and even days off to care for sick children – are often poorly tolerated by employers. As a result, young women are often treated as ticking bombs that could go off at any time. As one woman puts it, “If you have already given birth, that is seen as a disadvantage, because young children may fall ill, and you are therefore undesirable. If you have not yet given birth, you are also undesirable.”¹¹ This reinforces structural disadvantages for women in the labour market.

In 2018, a representative study published by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung explored the everyday realities and aspirations of Hungarian women.¹²

It highlighted a range of structural problems, including inadequate working conditions and low wages, a growing care crisis involving both elderly relatives and children, and the tension between demographic expectations placed on women and workplace demands that assume constant availability. In this context, material conditions dominated the discourse, while symbolic political struggles around gender equality and sexual harassment were largely secondary or absent. The analysis points to a grim reality: for many Hungarian women, having children has become an increasingly unaffordable enterprise rather than a realistic life choice.

The greatest challenge lies in caring for children already born, while simultaneously being confronted with repeated calls for higher birth rates. In practice, however, state concern often remains rhetorical, focused primarily on the unborn, both present and future. Couples and single parents who have already fulfilled the regime’s pronatalist expectations are frequently left without sufficient support. At the same time, most women continue to express a desire for children but identify the workplace and a toxic work culture as significant obstacles to achieving a fulfilling life.

Reality knocks at the door

Viktor Orbán relied on various forms of symbolic pressure and political messaging to obscure the structural problems affecting women. Yet, in the spring of 2026, reality came to confront the regime directly.

Following the parliamentary elections in April, centre-right party TISZA gained a landslide victory, and the Orbán regime collapsed. The antiliberal project ultimately failed. It was primarily residents of smaller settlements and towns, many with vocational training or high school diplomas as their highest level of education, who turned against Orbán’s so-called System of National Cooperation (Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere, NER), the ideological and political framework that turned Hungary into an illiberal regime. Healthcare workers, teachers, and civil servants emerged as the clear losers of a corrupt system marked by economic stagnation and the constant emotional strain of state-driven propaganda.

The Hungarian case illustrates a broader tension between demographic policy, gender inequality, and social welfare.

Viktor Orbán and his hegemonic party Fidesz failed to address the everyday realities facing Hungarians. The illiberal “carefare” regime prioritised population growth over quality of life, obscuring more pressing social concerns. By naturalising reproduction as a default aspiration, this discourse reinforced anxieties about national decline and limited the scope of public debate. While Orbán waged symbolic campaigns against pseudo-enemies, the newly elected prime minister Péter Magyar has pledged to refocus on economic policy and to rebuild trust with European allies. For many Hungarian women, such a shift could bring long-awaited relief, particularly if political actors retreat from attempts to regulate their bodies and their private lives.

Reorienting demographic thinking

The Hungarian case illustrates a broader tension between demographic policy, gender inequality, and social welfare. One possible solution in the post-illiberal era is to reorientate demographic thinking from an exclusive focus on increasing birth rates towards improving life expectancy, health, and overall quality of life, and for more equal, democratic approaches to care.

The demographic future proposed by TISZA focuses primarily on diaspora return. The party has announced plans to encourage the return of Hungarians living abroad, many of whom left the country due to economic insecurity and fearmongering politics. A second key element of its electoral programme is improving life expectancy. Since 1981, deaths have consistently outnumbered live births, with annual numbers remaining around 130,000 since 2010. Women also continue to die in slightly higher numbers than men each year. While the programme references the “rehumanisation” of obstetric care and improved access to IVF treatment, it pays comparatively little attention to the persistent demographic pressure placed on women to give birth, which many consider to be revealing of the new government’s stance on these issues.

Compared to the demographic paradigms of previous decades, a policy focus on diaspora return and increased life expectancy would indeed represent a meaningful shift in both rhetoric and practice. By moving away from an exclusive fixation on fertility rates and the regulation of women’s reproductive choices, such an approach could reframe demographic policy around lived lives rather than abstract population targets. Instead of attempting to reverse what may be an irreversible demographic trend, policy and resources should be directed towards improving the wellbeing of those already living. The success of future policies remains an open question, but it certainly points to a more humane horizon for demographic policy.

1. Anikó Gregor & Eszter Kováts (2018). Nőügyek 2018: társadalmi problémák és megoldási stratégiák: a kutatási eredmények összefoglalója. Budapest: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Available at <https://collections.fes.de/publikationen/ident/fes/14461>. Author’s translation. ︎
2. Szandra Kramarics (2025). “The marketization of family planning: the role of banks as policy actors in Hungarian reproductive policies”. Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics, Vol. 11(2), pp. 26–45. Available at <https://doi.org/10.17356/ieejsp.v11i2.1368>. ︎
3. Dorottya Szikra (2009). “Social Policy and Anti-Semitic Exclusion before and during World War II in Hungary. The Case of the Productive Social Policy”, in Gisela Hauss & Dagmar Schulte (eds). Amid Social Contradictions: Towards a History of Social Work in Europe. Opladen & Farmington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Available at <https://bit.ly/3QBmcU7>. ︎
4. Andrea Pető & Fanni Svégel (2024). “Nationalism, Pronatalism, and the Guild of Gynecology: The Complex Legacy of Abortion Regulation in Hungary”. Central European History, Vol. 57(4), pp. 499-516. Available at <https://doi:10.1017/S0008938924000037>. ︎
5. Eva Fodor (2022). The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary. Cham: Palgrave Pivot. Available at <https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/51949>. ︎
6. Andrea Pető & Fanni Svégel (2024). ︎
7. Hungarian Central Statistical Office (n.d.). “22.1.1.6. Live births, total fertility rate”. Last accessed: 27 April 2026. Available at <https://bit.ly/4tCP4tG>. ︎
8. Fanni Dés & Krisztina Les (2024). “Azt a füzetet nem szabadna mutogatni” Nők élményei Magyarországon az abortuszhoz való hozzáférés gyakorlatáról. Budapest: Patent Egyesület. Available at <https://bit.ly/4uE6uH8>. ︎
9. Andrea Pető & Zsuzsanna Balázs (2026). Viktor Orbán’s Affairs with Women: The Illiberal Playbook: Gender, Power, and Control. Budapest: CEEOL Press. ︎
10. Eurostat (2026). “Marriage and divorce statistics”. Data extracted in March 2026. Available at <https://bit.ly/4dQqLC9>. ︎
11. Anikó Gregor & Eszter Kováts (2018). ︎
12. Ibid. ︎

Built on the assumption that price is the best measure of value, modern economics has never adequately grasped non-transactional exchange – care relationships and reproductive work above all. Declining birth rates and ageing societies are now laying bare the limits of a framework that feminist thinkers have long critiqued. An interview with economist Emma Holten.

Green European Journal: The history of modern political theory is marked by a major omission – of bodies, their needs, and the necessity of caring for them. How did this omission come about?  

Emma Holten: Enlightenment thinking was very much about liberating the individual – from hierarchy, from the ties of religion and superstition, from the bounds of class. Thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, for example, were very progressive in their belief that the individual has value in and of itself. That conviction became the building block of modern political theory, and it has been hugely important for feminism, too. However, it overlooked that individuals are connected not only in oppressive systems but also in positive relationships. Human beings exist only in the context of other human beings. But that interdependence disappeared.  

This omission was most striking in the context of birth and family relationships. The whole story of what it takes to give birth and raise an individual completely disappeared, and we started making political theory about well-educated adults, as if they sprang up like mushrooms. 

How did this original sin become so entrenched in modern economics? 

Economics, too, had a noble ambition: to provide a clear description of the political system and to be able to quantify it. In the 1870s, this ambition culminated in the marginalist revolution, which was probably the most influential shift in the history of economics. Marginalism is based on the idea that you can use market prices to establish value. According to this theory, the market-clearing price is the perfect balance between supply and demand, between how much one wants to be paid for a product or service and how much someone else is willing to pay for it.  

Many of us grow up thinking that economics is like physics or chemistry […] We don’t question it because it would feel like questioning gravity.

The obvious corollary is that if something doesn’t have a price, it doesn’t have value. Economics loses the ability to speak about things that don’t have a price, such as time spent with friends or in the home. The only way to measure the value of time spent at home caring for others or being cared for by others is to calculate how much you would make if you used that time in the market instead.  

However, I don’t think price is a good measure of value in the market either. I spend a lot of time talking to nurses, caregivers for elderly people, and social workers, and when I tell them that economics measures their value by their salary, they are either shocked or start laughing. When you receive care, you don’t necessarily know what the value of that interaction is going to be; it only becomes visible in the long term. And if this interaction happens in the public sector, then the market is all the more unable to grasp its value. Economic methods find it much easier to understand the value of a car than the value of care, both paid and unpaid.  

 Why is this way of thinking about value so difficult to dispel?  

Many of us grow up thinking that economics is like physics or chemistry. That it has always been the same, and we’ve always looked at value the same way. And this is a huge part of economics’ power. We don’t question it, because it would feel like questioning gravity. American economist Paul Samuelson famously said that he didn’t care who held political office as long as he got to write economics textbooks. Economics conditions the way we think about politics.  

The rise of Thatcherism, of neoliberalism – the idea that the market comes before the state, and that the state’s responsibility is to take care of the market, not the people – has reinforced this influence. We let economists decide how much we should work, how much time parents should be able to spend with their children, what the optimal way to provide childcare is, or how to take care of nature. But these are fundamentally political questions. Their depoliticisation has exacerbated the dynamic whereby things that economics can value tend to be overvalued, while those it cannot value become completely valueless. 

Dominant theories may be unable to account for the value of care in the economy, yet they assume a steady and abundant supply of care to sustain the economic system. How do you make sense of this paradox?  

This is probably the central paradox in how modern economics deals with care. It has the idea that people are rational agents, act in their own self-interest, and are oriented towards the market. And so the provision of care, which largely falls outside the market, remains a blind spot. Economic theories tend to assume an endless supply of care, without a clear theory of how it is sustained.  

Based on their own reasoning, women would never have children because it is completely irrational from a market perspective. Yet when birth rates decline, suddenly shock ensues. I sometimes wonder whether economists are angrier at women when they have children or when they don’t. If they do have children and need to work part-time, that’s expensive and doesn’t create enough value. But if they don’t have children, that suddenly becomes a huge issue for the economy.  

When you study economics, the first thing you learn is the production function. How does a product come to be? In that function, there’s a variable called “L”. That’s labour power. But there is no acknowledgement of where it comes from; it’s just there. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the poverty of the theories. 

 I sometimes wonder whether economists are angrier at women when they have children or when they don’t. 

Feminist thinkers have challenged the approach that treats care as entirely outside the economic equation, but they haven’t always agreed on how best to make the case for it.  

Feminist theorists, particularly Italian feminists like Silvia Federici, have been instrumental in showing that the undervaluing of care is a central part of capitalism. This applies to paid and unpaid care, to the public and the private sector alike.  

The big question was: to price or not to price? Should we speak the devil’s language? Some feminist economists, especially in the early days of the field, argued that we should price unpaid care so we can include it in GDP and measure it. This was based on the reasoning that we can’t change the system, and so we need to use its language and its rules in our favour.  

We’ve seen a similar logic at play in the environmental movement, where putting a price on a tree or a marsh seems to be the best way to protect it. But pricing ignores the relationships; it isolates and splits things up. And when you talk about nature, you cannot isolate and split. The same goes for care. The value of a mother, just like that of a tree, is not visible at the time of the exchange; it is long-term, and it is reciprocal: mother and child are changing one another. You cannot say that one is giving something to another, as if it were a simple transaction.  

 The home, in particular, has been a subject of controversy within feminist thought. Is it a prison or a shelter, a site of oppression and exploitation or one of liberation? 

It is both. Historically, the home has been a site of extreme violence against women, and we can understand why so much of feminist thought was focused on getting women out of the home and getting them to make their own money. The dominant type of feminism, middle-class feminism, places a strong emphasis on achieving workplace equality between women and men. You can see this in EU strategies for gender equality, for example. That’s what takes up all the space. But many women, especially lower-class or migrant women who face exploitation, are actually fighting to get into the home, to have enough money to see their own children, to have time to rest. This is the double vision we need when we deal with care. The fight goes both ways. And for many people, home is also a place of liberation. 

Meanwhile, we haven’t made a big enough effort to get men into the home. Sometimes, we have fallen into the trap of idealising men’s lives and framing them as free, equating paid work with freedom. But paid labour isn’t necessarily freedom. There are many men who are exploited or work in terrible conditions. Where’s the policy to liberate them?  

Could the resurgence of “traditional” gender roles – as promoted in the “manosphere” and the “tradwife” online movements – be partly understood as a reaction to these failures rather than simply a backlash against women’s emancipation?  

When it comes to care, many of the distinctions between right-wing and left-wing positions tend to collapse. Sometimes I see overlaps in places I didn’t expect. “Tradwives” and other socially conservative people often ask for the same things that progressive people ask for: more community, more time with children, less market dominance in our lives, more focus on love and social relationships, and a reaction against individualism. When I hear a conservative woman say that life is more than work, that what matters are the people we love, I find myself nodding. Then she might add that the man’s role is to dominate, and that’s where she loses me.  

But we should not underestimate the potential to speak about these issues across differences. When I speak to nurses in hospitals, they suddenly realise they find common ground on this, even with people they usually disagree with politically. The devaluation of care is the core of both right- and left-wing anger right now.  

 Does the devaluation of care help explain Europe’s consistently low birth rates over the last few decades?  

If I were to speak to a politician who cares about economic growth and wants women to have more children, I’d tell them to start by offering better childcare and longer parental leave. I was brought up in the 1990s and 2000s, thinking that we had gender equality, and women would live lives that were completely like men’s. Many of us were more educated than most men and made more money than many men. But when they had children, many in my generation were shocked to find out how much gender still mattered.  

But I don’t think it’s just a matter of affordability. Birth rates are declining worldwide, regardless of the cost of living situation. This can be a good thing from a feminist perspective, especially if very young women are waiting longer to have children. But it also has to do with the types of societies we have created, where having children can be quite lonely and make it very difficult to spend time on anything else, including work and hobbies.  

Do pro-birth policies focusing narrowly on economic incentives miss the point?  

Economic theory and policymaking lack a theory of culture, but economics and culture go hand in hand. What we value economically tends to spill over into what we value culturally, and vice versa. The decision to have or not to have children is influenced by both cultural change and economic considerations. Yet when economists speak about demographics, they are at the limit of their theoretical capabilities because culture is simply not something they’re used to dealing with. In their market theory, there is no place for family choices. In a way, you could say that economics is supremely feminist in that rational market agents have no body and no gender. For many economists, I’m a consumer in the same way that a man is, at least until I become pregnant.  

You could say that economics is supremely feminist in that rational market agents have no body and no gender

There are, of course, exceptions. Alice Evans, for example, has done a lot of empirical work, interviewing women around the world about their choices to have or not have children. She found that cultural factors, such as social media use, can have a major impact on reproductive choices because they give access to different types of women’s lives and different female cultures, showing that options other than having a family also exist. She calls this phenomenon “cultural leapfrogging”.

The Left seems more reluctant to talk about demographic crisis or decline. Is there a way of reframing the issue in a more progressive way rather than surrendering it to right-wing narratives and cultural panic?  

Demographic decline is an umbrella term for many things, some of them good and others concerning. We should be extremely concrete in how we talk about decline and what we are worried about. My biggest worry is that, if the state retreats, the ever-expanding group of elderly people will have to be cared for by their daughters, as is already the case all over Europe.  

But there’s also an opportunity to think creatively about how we adapt to the new demographic situation. We cannot leave these big decisions to the market – the state needs to play a big role, too. All over Europe, we’re already seeing major recruitment issues in hospitals because pay is so low. From a green perspective, more jobs in care can be good news because it is a very sustainable type of work, and one that is extremely useful to society.  

Maybe the best way is to understand what we are going through as a care crisis, not a demographic one. It’s a new situation, and we need to adapt.  

Pro-birth policies tend to focus on heterosexual couples or, at best, the nuclear family model with two parents raising children. Is it time we question this norm?  

The family organisation of two parents raising children is actually quite unique in human history. It is the configuration that takes the least time away from the market because it is very steady and small; it requires little organising.  

If you ask any feminist economist what her main policy goal is, she will probably choose a shorter working day, which means more time in the home. Of course, there can be downsides, and we see it in countries where family care has a bigger cultural role: women tend to make less money and be less independent, which in turn creates a patriarchal family structure. However, there’s also the upside that families are more connected and have closer relationships, so we need to strike the right balance.  

This isn’t just about raising children. In Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe, we tend to just hide elderly people away. When someone cannot work anymore or is no longer self-sufficient, we don’t really want to see them; we don’t want them in the home. When I speak with Muslim feminists who have migrated to Europe, they tell me they find this to be extremely inhumane; they have a much more integrated relationship with elderly people in day-to-day life. 

In the new demographic reality, opening up the home means not only more care for those who need it, but also more help with raising children – and this doesn’t mean the state shouldn’t play its role in providing care. But we have closed off the home too much, and I think we see it in the crisis of loneliness that many adults are facing.  

While generations are not monolithic blocs, age is becoming an increasingly reliable predictor of how Europeans vote. As older cohorts grow in number and pull public spending towards their own needs, the gap between what the old have and what the young need is widening – leading some to warn that Europe is bound for an unavoidable clash of generations.

Europe is getting older. The median age in the EU rose to 45 for the first time last year. Elderly people, those aged 65 and over, are now comfortably a larger section of the population than those under 18 (22 per cent compared with less than 18 per cent).  

There is no election in Europe today in which the “grey vote” is not critical to the outcome.

And the greying of Europe has by no means peaked: by 2050, nearly 30 per cent of the population is predicted to be aged 65 and over. As the “old continent” gets older, the electoral power of elderly people increases. Over-50s now make up a majority of the electorate.  

More than one in four Europeans of voting age (27 per cent) are over 65. In reality, this underestimates their political power, as older people participate in elections more than young people. In the last European Parliament elections in 2024, just 36 per cent of eligible under-25s voted, compared to 65 per cent of over-55s. There is no election in Europe today in which the “grey vote” is not critical to the outcome. The greying of politics has consequences not just for which parties come to power but also what policies they favour.  

A politics shaped by the preferences of older people invariably has a knock-on effect on the economy. For better or worse, those with less time left on this Earth will continue to play a decisive role in shaping Europe’s future. 

Ideology vs vote 

Like any voting cohort, the grey vote is by no means homogeneous. Elderly voters’ preferences are also shaped by social factors other than age, like gender and social class. Nonetheless, political scientists have found that age is an increasingly decisive indicator of voter preference.

The German federal elections in 2025 clearly exemplified this tendency. Exit poll data showed that more than two-thirds of over-70s voted for the two traditional parties of power in the country, the centre-right CDU/CSU (43 per cent) and the centre-left SPD (25 per cent). No other party received more than 10 per cent of the vote from elderly voters. 

On the other hand, the vote of those aged 18 to 24 was much more evenly spread and polarised. The Left party won 25 per cent of the youth vote, with the far-right AfD second at 21 per cent, the CDU/CSU winning 13 per cent, and the SPD 12 per cent. The traditional parties of power won just a quarter of the youth vote, while the two most radically left- and right-wing parties won the most support, at a combined 46 per cent. Although women leaned more to the left and men to the right, and although lower-income voters were more likely to vote for AfD and higher-income voters leaned more towards the Greens, none of these sociological factors was as relevant as age to Germany’s voting pattern.  

Not all elections in Europe have shown such a stark age-based contrast as in Germany, but it is a familiar pattern. There is no official data on age-based voting in the recent Hungarian election, but polling indicated that 65 per cent of voters under 30 supported Péter Magyar’s insurgent Tisza Party while support for Viktor Orbán’s defeated Fidesz party was mainly concentrated among older voters. 

Interestingly, although voting patterns have become increasingly polarised by age, political scientist Tom O’Grady has found that ideological polarisation between different generations is no greater than it was in the 1980s, with all generations becoming more socially liberal in their views. “Despite all cohorts liberalising over time, each new cohort has also been persistently more socially liberal than its predecessor,” O’Grady states. However, O’Grady’s research challenges the common misconception that young people are straightforwardly more ideologically left-wing than older people, instead finding that they are “relatively libertarian”: they are more socially liberal but also more in favour of reduced government spending and taxes. 

What the grey vote wants 

What, then, explains the increasingly sharp difference in voting patterns? O’Grady finds that party identification differs from ideological preference, as young people have less loyalty to parties and are more open to parties that are relatively new to the political scene, whereas elderly people have more longstanding party political commitments and thus are less likely to shop around with their vote. “Age divides might appear to have grown due to the actions of parties, but in reality, young and old voters in Europe are not more polarised than in the past,” he says. 

We have established that there is such a thing as a grey vote, and there are signs that it is a more unified political bloc than the youth vote. But what is it that elderly people want politically?  

One recent review of the evidence found that older people have high levels of support for pensions and healthcare spending and low support for education and childcare spending. They are more politically sensitive to high inflation than to high unemployment and show less concern for high public debt than the population in general. In other words, elderly people seek to defend their interests as those who live off a pension rather than a wage.“ 

All people tend to discount the future and are myopic,” explains Tim Vlandas, a political scientist at the University of Oxford who has written extensively on “grey power”. That being said, there is some evidence that older people tend to discount the future even more than the average person does. “It’s not that older people say they don’t care about other things. It’s that when you force them to make a tradeoff, they are more likely to prioritise things that affect them more strongly.” 

Interestingly, this age-based self-interest does not seem to be specific to the “boomer” generation (born between 1946 and 1964), who currently make up most of the elderly population. Vlandas has found that grey voter preferences have broadly been consistent across decades of polling. We can expect, then, that the preferences of elderly voters will persist as their weight of numbers continues to grow. 

There is some evidence that older people tend to discount the future even more than the average person does

Grey power and its consequences 

Across Europe, spending on pensions is rising as a share of total public spending. The latest OECD data finds that in France, pension spending rose to a new peak of 22.9 per cent of total public spending. Meanwhile, in austerity-ravaged Greece, pension spending now makes up 28.5 per cent of public spending, up from 21.9 per cent in 2000. Pensions are the largest single item in public expenditure budgets, but healthcare and social care for elderly people are also major costs on government balance sheets. The European Central Bank estimated that age-related fiscal costs were a quarter of total public spending in 2022. 

Of course, the rise in spending on elderly people is, to a large degree, need-driven: the fact that there are more older people of a dependent age means that demand for public services among that age group inevitably rises. But public spending priorities are as much about political will as they are about necessity. Perhaps no country has been a greater test of the battle between the two than France.  

French president Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly pursued pension reform, most recently in 2023, when he sought to raise the standard retirement age from 62 to 64 via a bill on social security financing. Faced with opinion polls showing deep opposition to the reforms, major strikes, street protests, and rebellion from inside the National Assembly, Macron relied on an arcane constitutional rule to force through the bill, sidestepping a parliamentary vote.  

What does the French experience tell us about the politics of ageing? David Jamieson, a Scottish writer and activist, believes that French society, from young to old, shows a high level of commitment to defending a dignified “third age”. “You envy France’s political culture in some ways,” he says. “There seems to be a greater consciousness in France that there exists class interests and social interests which are not overwhelmed by generational divides.”  

Jamieson, a new father and a millennial, rejects the “technocratic” notion that trade-offs between public spending on the needs of elderly people on families, and on worker-friendly policies are inevitable. “Let’s be honest about the political direction of travel in Europe,” he says. “There’s not a wave of governments trapped by electoral arithmetic who desperately want to redirect money from pensioners to the working-age population.” He adds, “In reality, governments are eager to subtract from both those of pensioner age and those of working age, and redirect those resources to defence spending and various forms of financial support for big business.” 

France is by no means the only country in which attempts at pension reform have met immense political resistance. The German government came up against fierce public opposition last year when it sought to raise the retirement age to 70. In Spain, pensions were delinked from the inflation rate during the eurozone crisis in 2014, but after years of protests, the Spanish government restored indexing pensions to inflation in 2021. 

Pension consensus and vicious circles  

Part of the reason for the stubbornness of pension spending is that it is supported by both young and old. Vlandas believes that the positive attitude of young people towards pension spending can be at least partly explained by the fact that many are economically dependent on their parents, especially in Southern Europe. “In Greece, Italy and Spain, where the welfare state is quite pension-heavy, the young face a lot of labour market insecurity,” he says. “If you are in that world and you live with your parents – as a lot of young people do in these countries – it makes perfect sense for you to be invested in the one thing that does offer security for you: the pension of your parents.” 

“So the more pension-heavy a country becomes, the more it reinforces support for pensions. Why would I support my parents’ pension being cut, in exchange for a potential investment in people of working age that I don’t trust will actually be delivered? That trade doesn’t seem very appealing,” Vlandas concludes.  

The paradox of a politics that is heavily weighted towards public spending on elderly people is that the ability to sustain that spending over time is strongly influenced by the productivity of the very workers who are not being prioritised for investment. Charles Goodhart, a retired LSE professor of economics who also worked at the Bank of England, believes this contradiction will ultimately make it “difficult” for governments to continue to satisfy the demands of elderly voters. 

“The problem is that as the old-age dependency ratio grows, the fiscal position gets worse and also GDP growth slows, which then worsens the fiscal position even more,” he adds. “With rising defence spending and the increased spending which will be needed to manage climate change, the fiscal outlook really is dire.” 

Goodhart co-authored The Great Demographic Reversal, published in 2020, which finds that the global economy is at the start of a profound shift from a low-inflation era to a permanently high-inflation one, as the number of elderly people – who are consumers but not producers – grows. Moreover, lower labour supply due to ageing and higher taxes on the working-age population will push workers to seek above-inflation pay rises, which will add to inflationary pressures. With elderly voters tending to punish governments for inflation, Goodhart is “certain” that this will lead to political division on an intergenerational basis. “The young are in trouble. If you just take the issue of housing, elderly people are relatively asset-rich while the young find it very difficult to get out of their parents’ home, to finance their own, and to start having a family,” he explains. 

On the right and the left, the view that intergenerational conflict is inevitable is increasingly prominent

“That’s one of the factors keeping fertility down, which then shrinks the native workforce even more. Low birth rates add to the pressure for immigration to meet labour gaps, particularly in elderly care, which in turn spurs right-wing populism. So the whole thing is circling in a very dangerous way.” 

Is intergenerational conflict inevitable? 

On the right and the left, the view that intergenerational conflict is inevitable is increasingly prominent. Philip Pilkington, author of The Collapse of Global Liberalism and an advocate for Viktor Orbán’s far-right Fidesz party in Hungary, has argued that young people are likely to respond to being a demographic minority by taking advantage of the fact they are “physically stronger” to impose their will, as “it will be in their self-interest to abolish democracy”. Pilkington even goes as far as to say that the young will “not just accept, but actively promote, euthanasia” as a solution to win the “intergenerational war”. 

Oli Dugmore, editor of centre-left magazine The New Statesman and a millennial, appears to provide evidence for Pilkington’s prediction, writing that assisted dying would be “distasteful pragmatism” because it is a sure-fire way of curbing healthcare and pension costs while avoiding unnecessary suffering. He concludes, “Let them die.”

Jamieson believes that these hyperbolic positions can in part be explained by political polarisation, as populist parties – and their media advocates – seek to build age-based blocs of support. “We used to think parties construct voting blocs through consensus, whereas now it is clear that voting blocs are constructed through polarisation, and that invariably takes on a culture war form,” he argues. “That’s what we are seeing now as the Right and the Left seek to speak to specific – and often different – generations. But fundamentally, the issue of an ageing population is not a generational one.” 

Vlandas agrees that the generational dimension can be exaggerated in the public debate. “There are very few things that are specific about being a baby boomer to the challenges which arise from population ageing,” he finds. “It’s fundamentally about the position you occupy within the economic structure of advanced capitalism, and what makes you occupy this position is a shorter time-horizon, but more importantly, where you derive your livelihood from, which for the elderly is the pensions system.” 

What could stop a descent into populist intergenerational conflict? Vlandas makes the case for structural solutions that would increase the electoral participation of young people to counterbalance the grey vote, such as mandatory voting, and policy fixes like indexing pensions to wage levels. “You need to have a pension system that aligns the interests of people with pensions with the working age population as much as possible,” he says. 

Jamieson, on the other hand, believes that we should look to the power of social movements to disrupt the status quo. “I think a lot of people have the idea that you get social change when 50 per cent plus one of the population moves into action,” he says. “That never happens. Typically, it’s a small section of the population that engages in meaningful, confrontational action.” 

The future of radical politics 

But what is the future of protest politics in the context of an ageing population?  

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, famously said that “the revolution has always been in the hands of the young”, but if the young are an ever-shrinking section of society, will they still be an effective force in levering social change? Some on the left have raised doubts about the potential for radical upheaval in the context of grey power, but Jamieson believes these concerns are overblown. “There is a strong element of truth that if you look at the history of revolts, they are waged by young people,” he says. “There may be sociological and psychological reasons for that. But it’s important to remember that radical change is always driven by a minority of the population.” 

For Jamieson, “We have seen again and again in history that what is required from the rest of the population is either that they are more passively engaged on the side of the revolutionaries, or that they simply don’t defend the status quo.” 

In considering grey power, then, it is important to bear in mind that electoral weight is only one metric by which we should assess the potential political potency of a particular age group. Moreover, age does not deterministically define beliefs and actions: whether in the climate action movement or the Palestine solidarity movement, plenty of elderly people have played pivotal roles in recent years.  

However, age does matter. The structure of our economy and society changes as it becomes older, and that socio-economic structure frames the political choices available to us. Even if policies to increase birth rates worked, they would not increase the size of the workforce for another two decades or so.  

“Demography is destiny,” 19th-century French philosophe Auguste Comte is thought to have said. That might be slightly overstating the case, but at least in the realm of politics, Comte’s maxim retains a large grain of truth: governments are largely constrained by demography, and the reality of an ageing population means those constraints tighten by the day.

Demographic trends cannot be reversed – only navigated. Can societies guarantee wellbeing as the labour force shrinks and fiscal pressures mount? And as older cohorts outnumber the young, is intergenerational conflict inevitable?

This editorial introduces the summer print edition of the Green European Journal, “Life Lines: Navigating Demographic Shifts”. You can read it online or subscribe to receive a copy.

Slow-moving yet seemingly inexorable, demographic shifts have always been about more than just numbers, feeding the political imagination and popular culture alike. What is striking is how widespread panic about overpopulation has, in just a few years, given way to its mirror image: the fear of population decline and civilisational collapse. This anxiety now sits at the core of debates around migration, gender, identity, welfare, and more.

Indeed, since the mid-1960s, Europe’s birth rates have been in decline. In 2024, the total fertility rate in the EU stood at 1.34 live births per woman, well below the replacement level of 2.1. Low fertility, combined with rising life expectancy, leads to ageing populations and smaller workforces. These demographic trends are not confined to Europe or the West: while the global population is still growing, largely driven by most of Africa and parts of Asia, it is projected to peak before the end of the century and then begin to decline.

These long-term shifts have complex social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental causes and consequences, making them difficult to steer but impossible to ignore. According to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the EU could have around 43 million fewer people in the labour force by 2070. Economists warn this could put further pressure on public finances, at a time when climate impacts and higher defence spending are already tightening fiscal constraints.

Migration can partly shore up dwindling workforces, but it can also exacerbate demographic imbalances by leaving entire regions depopulated and underserved. This, in turn, increases inequality and plays into feelings of abandonment and resentment, undermining social cohesion and civil preparedness. These dynamics are particularly visible in Eastern Europe, where emigration has compounded the effects of consistently low birth rates. In response, governments in the region have intensified their efforts to attract back citizens who left following their countries’ accession to the EU, with mixed results so far.

Across the continent, age is emerging as an electoral fault line, with young voters exhibiting less attachment to political parties and higher polarisation than older generations. While all people have a tendency to discount the future, a bias towards the present is more pronounced among older cohorts. As they grow in number and their electoral weight increases, support for public spending on pensions and healthcare is likely to surpass that for expenditure on childcare, education, or employment.

In this context, a clash of generations may seem inevitable. But democratic innovations could help avert this – for instance, by rebalancing institutional processes in favour of those most affected by political decisions: children and young people, as well as future generations. To this end, a handful of EU countries have already established legal frameworks that grant voting rights to citizens under 18 (typically at 16). More radical proposals advocate for ageless suffrage, arguing that excluding children from the right to vote is a form of systemic discrimination. In a similar vein, the EU has recently launched a Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness to ensure a just distribution of opportunities, resources, and burdens across generations.

As the debate on social media bans for minors sweeping across Europe illustrates, the boundary between the participation and the protection of young people is not always clear. The days of naive social media utopianism are gone; today, platforms are widely seen less as enablers of a globalised public sphere than as reckless dopamine dealers. But for precisely this reason, some regard age-based bans as a surrogate for meaningful regulation, and it is undeniable that for many young people, social media remains a gateway to finding community and political engagement.

The complex role of social media has been most evident in recent Gen Z protest movements outside Europe. In Nepal, a 2025 ban on 26 platforms ignited discontent that was already boiling beneath the surface. More interconnected and educated than any previous generation, young Nepalese drew on lessons from other movements to defy repression – unseating one prime minister and appointing another within 48 hours. But the role of social media wasn’t only positive: TikTok complied with government censorship, while Discord amplified violent political emotions. Digitally enabled uprisings can nonetheless infuse new political awareness, even when they fall short of their aspirations – as in Kenya, where the violent repression of mass protests in 2024 could not put the genie of change back in the bottle.

That many of the most consequential political mobilisations of recent years have occurred in younger societies also raises questions about the prospects for radical politics in an ageing Europe facing democratic erosion and a rising far right.

Reactionary forces, for their part, claim to have answers to what they frame as a looming “demographic winter”. They have successfully dragged the dominant discourse on migration sharply rightward, stoking fears of “ethnic replacement” and now openly advocating “remigration”. They also want to roll back gender equality and women’s reproductive freedom in the name of demographic revival. However, the carrot of economic incentives for families influences little more than the timing of births, while the stick of coercion only delivers discrimination and suffering – certainly not the baby boom illiberal politicians fantasise about.

Alarmist rhetoric has not remained confined to the far right. In 2024, for example, French president Emmanuel Macron spoke of “demographic rearmament” to combat infertility, while neoliberal institutions routinely talk of Africa’s youth as a “bulge” to be socially engineered into a “dividend”.

In its early days, ecologism bought into demographic panic, too. Concerned about hunger, pollution, and resource depletion, early environmentalists warned of runaway population growth. That analysis was both superficial – how we produce and consume matters more for planetary health than how many of us there are – and prone to weaponisation – since those who are identified as “too many” are too often poor and racialised. Since then, political ecology has shrugged off its Malthusian heritage, but this has come at a cost: by disengaging from demographic questions altogether, it has relegated them to the private sphere and ceded the terrain to conservative framings.

This is a mistake that ecologists have the tools to overcome; after all, the question of how we inhabit the planet cuts to the core of the ecological worldview. Drawing an analogy to climate change may prove useful here. Just as we can no longer fully prevent global warming, we are also in no position to reverse ongoing demographic shifts. But that does not mean that nothing can or should be done. Better childcare, longer parental leave, banning infertility-inducing chemicals, gender equality, and standing for a more peaceful, less anxiogenic world all count as essential mitigation measures.

Adaptation can be equally transformative. It is about reforming democracies to foster participation and intergenerational dialogue, but also reckoning with the true value of paid and unpaid care work, including rehabilitating a sector that has long been undervalued and under-resourced. More fundamentally, however, it means pivoting our entire social and economic model away from productivity and growth and towards care for one another and for the planet.

The notorious precarity of journalism has led to a serious yet less obvious problem: the profession has become almost exclusive to those with the necessary cultural, economic, and social capital to endure many years of poor pay and sacrifice. As a result, there is a heightened risk of class bias in news. But can journalism be made more accessible and diverse?

Gaining professional status as a journalist very often entails a long and difficult period of precarity. And as Italian freelancer Sara* suggests, the fact that the job is often seen as a “mission” only makes matters worse.

Alice Facchini, an Italian freelance journalist and author of a survey on mental health within the profession in Italy for IrpiMedia, explains that “Precarity in the world of journalism – or at least the precarity we uncovered – is also linked to an identity-based vision of the profession: as in many creative professions, I accept precarity because I identify with the profession; I believe in it as a value, and I would therefore do anything to be able to engage in it because I see it as a mission.” 

Esperanza* is a Spanish journalist who agreed to talk about her experience. “I tried to put aside motivation and vocation and channel them elsewhere, not to cling to the mere fact of being a journalist. I did not want to condition my life on my vocation,” she says.

After some experience in another field, Esperanza returned to journalism. When asked whether it is possible in Spain to pursue the profession regardless of social class, she replies: “Frankly, it’s very difficult if you don’t have parents who can support you for an extended period. Most of my university friends had to go into communications and marketing, or spent a lot of time living off other jobs so that they could ‘invest’ in becoming journalists. This is what happened to me too: I do a lot of communication and marketing work. Doing journalism is a luxury.”

Doing journalism is a luxury.

How does one become a journalist?

It is often said that anyone starting out in journalism must be prepared to take risks: to spend time researching stories and angles that interest editorial staff, and which are relevant and original, or to bear the costs of a report without even being sure that anyone will run it. “We’re told that it’s better to go freelance at first, to take risks, etc. But taking risks when you have the means is easy; doing it when you struggle to pay the rent is not only complicated, it’s impossible. It is inconceivable to think that you have to end up on the street in order to do your job.” This is Sarah Ichou, director of Bondy Blog, an independent French newspaper founded in the wake of the French banlieue riots in 2005, precisely to represent those working-class neighbourhoods – the banlieues – and the voice of the people who live there.

Bondy is one of the communes of Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest and youngest department in metropolitan France. In the midst of an editorial meeting, Ichou tells me that “the real problem, which we have denounced for the last 20 years, is that of who makes the news.”

According to Alessandra Costante of the National Federation of the Italian Press (FNSI, Italy’s largest journalists’ union), “Today, to endure poverty while waiting for a contract, you have to be rich or be a burden to your family.”

Jana Rick is a doctoral student and research associate involved in the “Prekarisierung im Journalismus” (”Precarity in Journalism”) project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The study, conducted from 2019 to 2024, surveyed 1,000 journalists in Germany. Asked whether journalism is a class-specific profession, Rick replies: “Based on our research, we argue that journalism is a profession that you have to be able to afford financially. Journalists (especially freelancers) compensate for precarity with their partners’ income or receive support from other family members. This could point to a trend whereby journalism becomes a profession for the elite, which constitutes a threat to diversity in the media sector.”

Harald Fidler of the Viennese newspaper Der Standard argues that the media sector in Austria is diversifying, but precarity is still prevalent: “The beginning of a career is often characterised by poorly paid internships and freelance work, which one has to be able to afford financially. It is easier for those from families with higher incomes.”

Unequal access

In some European countries, such as France and Italy, attending a professional school is the main route to becoming a journalist, while internships are more common in other countries. However, in all cases, the question of economic, social, and cultural capital is central.

In France there are 14 Grandes écoles: recognised training courses that prepare aspiring journalists for the profession and are recognised by the National Joint Committee for the Employment of Journalists (CPNEJ). A university programme or a publicly‑funded master’s degree costs a few hundred euros per year, while private schools start at around 7,000 euros per year.

The same is true in Italy, where there are professional schools in addition to the journalism bar exam. A master’s programme costs from 8,000 to over 20,000 euros a year.

The situation is no less dire in Spain. Beatriz Lara, secretary of the press and communication section of the Spanish trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (“National Confederation of Labour”), says a clear trend is emerging: “In order to be an information professional, you usually have to pay for private master’s degrees, which often don’t even qualify, and cost from 10 to 15 thousand euros. Who can become a journalist when the price of admission to the media is between 10 and 15 thousand euros, with no guarantee of job security?” She adds: “It’s the same social class who has access to the profession, and who ultimately gets to frame reality. Those who have access to the media, those who sign the articles, have a very clear class bias. People from the lower classes have no voice.”

“We are told that what matters are the issues that affect an often well-off, highly educated and politically connected social class,” says Mazin Sidahmed, co-founder of Documented, an outlet created to serve the immigrant communities of New York City. “What interests this social class becomes the most important news of the day, and if you write for them, you make a name for yourself as a journalist, because that is how most newspapers have structured their operations: in reality, they serve that social class.” 

Those who have access to the media have a very clear class bias. People from the lower classes have no voice.

Privilege vs. selection

Claire* is 24 years old and attended the Institut français de Presse, the oldest journalism school in France. In her course, she tells me, there was certainly a diversity of ethnic backgrounds, but no diversity of social class. Claire explains that competition to enter the school is “extremely tough, extremely selective”, and that there are many who undertake a year of preparatory study before even trying to get a place.

There is also a very specific issue: schooling in France is fundamental for access to a professional career. Knowing how to get into which school and why also means attending the right secondary school. “Since secondary school, I already knew what I wanted to do. In my family and at school everything was clear.” Everyone who manages to enter the system knows the rules of the game, says Claire.

Claire’s father is a diplomat and her mother a translator. She has lived and trained abroad – including at King’s College in London – and speaks four languages. “Despite my enormous privilege, I couldn’t get a place in the school I wanted,” she explains, referring to the complexity of entering the prestigious Sciences Po, which was her first choice.

During our discussion, Claire insists on the difficulty of this competition: the quota for accepted applicants is “too low”, the number of applicants is too high, and those who already have the right background – culturally speaking – have “disproportionate advantages”. Moreover, she adds, some schools make their selection on the basis of a candidate’s “presentation dossier”. For example, those who, like Claire, have already completed an apprenticeship or worked in the media have a strong advantage. “Without my parents this would not have been possible,” she says.

Towards diversity?

In 2009, the Bondy Blog created the “Prépa égalité des chances” in collaboration with the Lille Graduate School of Journalism (ESJ Lille), one of the most prestigious schools in the country. This equal opportunities training course is free of charge and open to young people from low-income families. “Although the results have been very positive,” Ichou explains, “it does not mean that the problem has been solved: integration in editorial departments remains very complicated. And once a certain amount of experience has been acquired, access to certain positions of responsibility remains very, very complicated”.

Since 2007, La Chance has been providing training to young people with less access to these schools. Every year, thanks to around 350 volunteer professional journalists, the association prepares around 80 fellows for the entrance exams of journalism schools in Bordeaux, Paris, Marseille, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Grenoble, and Rennes. “The competition is a compulsory step for aspiring journalists wishing to enter a school. The problem is that not all young people have the same chances of passing it. The duration and cost of the studies discourage those of more modest means,” explains Baptiste Giraud, who is in charge of student placement in the Paris office.

Giraud says La Chance’s preparatory programme is a free training course, which “can be taken in the afternoon, evening or weekend, depending on the case”. He adds: “We try to target students from the city’s priority neighbourhoods, both urban and rural.”

According to the association’s data,  the students who took part in the training programmes in 2024 mostly came from families where the parents work in what are considered “low‑skill jobs” (cleaning staff, security guards, home care and healthcare assistants, and drivers). There are also single-parent families, and a large share of blue-collar workers –  14.3 per cent of the fathers and 2.6 per cent of the mothers fall into that category. Moreover, 11.7 per cent of the fathers and 15.6 per cent of the mothers are unemployed.

“For quality news, it is essential to have journalists from different backgrounds: [otherwise] the risk is social reproduction, and always having the same point of view represented,” says Giraud. In France, he says, “the situation is changing. But it is very, very far from perfect. […] I have many testimonies from former students who did editorial internships. There were many cases of discrimination, racism, homophobia, and sexual harassment.”

“Indeed”, adds Sarah Ichou, “when we look at the reality, this is what we see. This is a profession that has a very hard time renewing itself, and it is also particularly precarious for people from disadvantaged social categories, for people who are victims of racism. This depends on several factors, but one particular factor is that many editorial offices still do not post job offers publicly. It is difficult to get ahead, and even more so when you come from a working-class background.”

So, paradoxically, becoming a journalist requires a privileged social background, but once you become a journalist the general rule is low pay and precarious contracts.

This is especially true for freelancers, but also for those with a contract. This precarity also affects the profession’s social prestige as Miteva*, a freelancer in Croatia, explains: “Journalists in Croatia have become part of the working class, judging by their earnings. The current average salary for journalists in Croatia is lower than the average net salary, which, according to data from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics, was 1,451 euros per month in May 2025. Journalists (both freelance and salaried) are underpaid, which undoubtedly affects the quality of journalism. Journalism is not seen as a prestigious profession – on the contrary, public opinion of journalists is quite low – so those who can afford to work for less money generally do not enter the profession.”

This article was produced as part of the PULSE project, a European initiative to support cross-border journalistic collaborations. It originally appeared in Voxeurop and is republished here with permission. 

The data provided is not always consistent or comparable, given the different contexts of the media organisations that agreed to participate, as well as the different national contexts. This work should therefore be understood as an overview of a general malaise within the profession in Europe, especially among freelance journalists, and opens up the question of a common regulation for the various employment statuses within the profession.

 For their work, patience and contributions to this article, I would like to thank Lola García-Ajofrín, Ana Somavilla (El Confidencial, Spain), Harald Fidler (Der Standard, Austria), Dina Daskalopoulou (Efysn, Greece), Krassen Nikolov (Mediapool, Bulgaria) and Petra Dvořáková (Deník Referendum, Czech Republic).

The Czech region of Moravia-Silesia was once referred to as the “boiler room” of Europe, but coal mining is soon slated to be phased out after decades of declining production. While EU-sponsored projects and the Czech government’s retraining programmes have achieved some success in facilitating green transformation, the region’s future remains uncertain amid political corruption, social exclusion, and a lack of a coherent vision for a just transition.

On the outskirts of the city of Karviná in the coal-rich Czech region of Moravia-Silesia is located the Church of Saint Peter of Alcántara. Mining activity has caused the building to sink some 37 meters and tilt nearly 7 degrees to the south, earning it the nickname the “leaning church”.  Karin Lednická’s popular trilogy of novels by the same title recounts the fate of the church and tells the story of the people in the area’s mining colonies, where many other buildings have developed cracks, sunk, and collapsed. In the second half of the 20^th century, the old town had to be demolished gradually as a result and rebuilt elsewhere.

Within sight of this much-visited heritage site, a heated debate is brewing around the future of Karviná. As Czechia prepares to phase out its last deep coal mine, plans to turn the area into an industrial zone are stirring opposition, and populist politicians are trying to bank on social discontent.

Conflicting visions

The effects of coal extraction are starkly visible around the Czechoslovak Army Mine in Stonava, a municipality in the Karviná district. The dead, “lunar” landscape is interspersed with sludge ponds, and artificially recultivated green spaces with trees that intersect with rusty piping. Underground pipes installed to allow methane to escape from the old tunnels stick out from the surface. And the remains of old streetlamps tower above water-filled depressions in the ground.  Much of the coal industry’s waste ended up in these areas, which used to have thousands of inhabitants. Now, the dumps and sludge ponds will be waiting for years for land reclamation to start.

Together with Jan Lenart, a geologist from Ostrava University who specialises in undermined landscapes, we are scouring through demolished houses and old roads amongst the remains of the old town of Stará Karviná. The visit is a unique experience, and not just for fans of the Leaning Church trilogy. Thanks to the process of spontaneous succession (the natural recovery of an ecosystem, without human intervention) and the fact that many areas have been lying fallow, the area resembles an open-air museum.

Locals have also come to appreciate the value of this changing landscape. In summer, many flock to the shores of the “Karviná Sea” – the lake created as a result of mining depressions – to swim or attend cultural events.

For more than seven years, Lenart has been mapping the territory in order to lay out a vision for its recreational and touristic use. He is planning bike paths, hiking trails, and historic sites. However, the geologist laments that public authorities lack a clear vision of what to do with the landscape in its post-mining phase. According to representatives of the Moravian-Silesian Investment and Development Agency, the area is ready for construction: it is well-networked with water and gas pipelines and roads, even if the ground surface is still settling.

But fragmented ownership of the land makes it difficult for public authorities to plan its future. Asental Land (owned by Czech billionaire Zdeněk Balaka), a real estate group owning the largest share of the Karviná area, is eager to turn it into an industrial zone. In addition, American development company Panattoni has presented a plan to “attract top-notch investment” and “return thousands of jobs” to Moravia-Silesia, where employment has been negatively affected by the phaseout of coal.  If this plan goes through, prefabricated halls will soon be visible from the leaning church.

However, these proposals have sparked opposition from conservationists and locals, who are not eager to see new industrial buildings replace the old mining complex. The construction plan might also clash with one of the strategic projects of the Just Transition Mechanism, an EU policy framework aimed at alleviating socio-economic impacts in the areas that are most affected by the transition to a low-carbon economy. The project in question is the POHO Park Gabriela, named after a former coal mine and designed for visitors who seek rest and relaxation.

Industrial glory and decline

Ostrava, the capital of the Moravian-Silesian region, is known as the “steel heart” of the Czech Republic. Black coal extraction, dating back to the late 18^th century, powered the establishment of Vítkovice Ironworks in 1828 and enabled the development of the Austro-Hungarian railway network.

Before then, the predominantly agricultural population relied on wood from the nearby Beskydy forest. Local artisans were aware of the existence of black coal long before the Karviná-Ostrava basin became one of the most important mining sites in Austria-Hungary and played a fundamental role in the industrial development of the entire monarchy. The volume of extraction grew throughout the 20^th century. Even World War II did not lower the region’s productivity, although mining equipment was damaged.

By 1946, the Communist-led government had nationalised a total of 32 mines, nine coking plants, 10 mining power plants, ironworks in Třinec and Vítkovice, farms and forests, and several other industrial enterprises in the region. With annual production volumes increasing and the mining industry failing to comply with safety regulations, fatal accidents occurred regularly (for instance, the death of 108 miners at the Dukla mine in 1961 as a result of a fire). From the 1960s onwards, mining activities accelerated, until they reached a peak in 1979 with 24.1 million tonnes of coal mined. Since 1982, production has been in steady decline.

As demand for coke rose and salaries grew, many young men and their families came to Moravia-Silesia. Mining soon became associated with a sense of pride, even though some workers – i.e., political and other prisoners –  ended up in the mines as a punishment. A coal-fired heavy industry took shape in the area, and new towns were built or expanded around it – including Karviná. Air pollution was one of the side effects: as recently as the 1990s, Ostrava was famous for its intense smog.

After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the coal industry underwent a rapid decline. The government compensated laid-off miners and started large-scale retraining courses, which have successfully continued to this day. But these offers have failed to resolve all the challenges facing the Moravian-Silesian population, which has driven the population to emigrate to other regions en masse.

Adéla Gajdicová, a student and young journalist from Moravia-Silesia, recently asked her peers why they weren’t planning to remain in their native region. Some pointed to the subpar quality of education, while others mentioned factors like low pay, lack of interesting work opportunities, or insufficient support for entrepreneurship. Social geographer Ondřej Šlach says that half of those leaving the region are between 19 and 30 years old.

By the year 2080, one-third of the 1.1 million current inhabitants of Moravia-Silesia are predicted to leave it, most of them young people. During just the first month of 2025, more than 6,500 residents moved away, most often from the Karviná and Ostrava area. The population is ageing, and buildings, streets, and whole housing estates are being demolished.

The wave of privatisation that followed Czechoslovakia’s transition to democracy negatively impacted communities that were already struggling due to industrial decline. In 1990, the 43,000 housing units that formerly belonged to the Ostrava-Karviná Mines (OKD) – the largest housing holdings in Central Europe – were privatised. Billionaire Zdeněk Bakala took control of them, along with the commercial structures, land, and recreational real estate.

Bakala never kept his promise of selling the homes to their tenants at affordable prices. Eventually, in 2020, the units were sold to Heimstaden, a Swedish real estate firm. Residents complain that Heimstaden not only keeps raising rents on the units – driving up rental prices in the region as a whole – but it also does not communicate well with tenants. The situation is mirrored in properties Heimstadem owns elsewhere, for instance in Berlin or in the Swedish city of Malmö. In an interview with Czech media outlet PageNotFound, a co-founder of the Stop Heimstaden initiative complained about “regular raising of the rent, short-term contracts, poor maintenance, the impossibility of ever connecting directly with somebody from the firm”.

In 2024, one of the tenants brought the case before the European Court of Human Rights after the Czech courts found no wrongdoing in the privatisation process. The case is still open. Meanwhile, the Bakala Foundation is trying to rebuild the reputation of its owner in the region, for example by offering scholarships and other activities for talented students. This year, municipalities began buying back housing units from Heimstaden at significantly higher prices than they were sold, but even so, the company remains Czechia’s largest landlord.

Ostrava and its surrounding areas have one of the highest concentrations of socially excluded localities – second only to the Ústecký region, another former coal-mining area. More than 20,000 inhabitants, including children, are living in social exclusion in the Moravian-Silesian region. The towns of Karviná and Orlová are consistently placed at the bottom of Czechia’s quality-of-life rankings, often alternating for last place.

Ostrava and its surrounding areas have one of the highest concentrations of socially excluded localities – second only to another former coal-mining area.

Campaigning on disaffection

Meanwhile, opportunistic politicians are trying to bank on social discontent. Former prime minister Andrej Babiš will be the right-wing ANO party’s front-running candidate for Moravia-Silesia in parliamentary elections in October. The party is leading the polls, and Babiš has good chances of being elected premier again.

Although he was born in neighbouring Slovakia, Babiš has claimed that he has a historical relationship to the “unique” region. The former prime minister claims credit for the construction of a bypass around the city of Frýdek, and for “saving” OKD after Bakala stripped the mines’ assets. At the same time, he has professed his love for the Jeseníky Mountains – despite facing criticism for his government’s failure to address a devastating bark beetle infestation there. And in recent months, Babiš has often been photographed attending cultural events or wearing the jerseys of local sports teams from Moravia-Silesia.

What brought the populist former premier to the region is mostly its untapped electoral potential: turnout in the last parliamentary election stood at 60 per cent – 10 percentage points lower than in Prague.  “We need as many of you as possible to come to the polls here,” declared Babiš, whose campaign events are well attended by both pensioners and younger people. He has often used these gatherings to speak against EU policy and praise US President Donald Trump.

Babiš says Czechia is corrupt and that Moravia-Silesia has been robbed. The region’s inhabitants have no doubt that the latter claim, at least, is correct, as the political representation of the region has undergone one scandal after another. However, Babiš tends to omit the fact that his party is also entangled in these scandals.

Last year, former Moravian-Silesian governor Jan Krkoška left the ANO movement after being convicted of bribing doctors on behalf of the pharmaceutical company he was working for. In the months following Krkoška’s downfall, vice-governor Jakub Unucka (from the Civic Democratic Party, ODS) resigned after being charged in a regional scandal for influencing the distribution of public tenders in exchange for bribes. ANO is currently governing the region in coalition with other right-wing and far-right parties.

Missed opportunities

Populist narratives find fertile ground in a region that, after centuries of supplying coal to the country and beyond, has yet to forge a new identity. Can the Moravian-Silesian community truly move on from coal? Workers still hold ceremonies honouring their mining tradition with their work uniforms, and they pay homage to colleagues who perished in mining accidents.

The Leaning Church brought stories from the coal region to thousands of readers who now travel there to photograph it. The former steelworks in Dolní Vítkovice have also found a second life as a venue for music festivals, cross-country skiing, firefighting competitions, and other events for smaller and larger communities. This year, for instance, world-famous singer and songwriter Sting performed against a backdrop of rusted pipes in Ostrava. Still, the touristification of industrial heritage is not replicable everywhere and is not enough to guarantee a prosperous future for the people of Moravia-Silesia.

At the same time, regional leaders, the mayors of former mining municipalities, and private investors remain fixated on the idea of attracting a single large employer that can provide thousands of jobs – as demonstrated by the Panattoni Smart Park project in Karviná. The Just Transition Fund was meant to offer an alternative path, enabling a green transformation that would protect the most vulnerable. However, the 10 projects sponsored by the scheme in Moravia-Silesia lack a unifying vision and often fail to address the real needs of citizens.

To address this problem, the Centre for Business, Professional and International Studies (CEPIS) – still under construction in Karviná – is encouraging residents participating in its courses to establish their own enterprises. The IT sector promises to bring new opportunities and higher-than-average pay, and some former miners are seizing this opportunity by retraining. The 2020 documentary A New Shift, which follows a miner trying to become a computer programmer, shows that this process is far from easy. While initiatives like Trautom – which provides education and advisory services – aim to help former coal workers find new career paths, the image of laid-off miners as victims of the transition still dominates Czech media.

The Black Cube library, whose construction started this spring in the centre of Ostrava, is another project supported by the Just Transition Fund – one aimed primarily at promoting culture rather than technology. Upon completion, the building will resemble a block of coal surrounded by a moat. The design, however, is more than 20 years old, which might explain the high energy intensity of the building. “Its seven floors will be full of opportunities waiting to be discovered,” the director of the project tells me, without providing much detail. He says part of the project’s funding has been earmarked as small grants for the activities of local nonprofit organisations.

But the project is also facing criticism. Zuzana Klusová, a social worker and a local politician of the Pirate Party, thinks the library is a waste of resources. “Are we telling poor children from Karviná they have to travel to a library that costs almost 82 million euros in the centre of Ostrava, which would take them an hour by public transportation, when they do not even have a telephone at home from which they could call the child safety hotline?” she asks ironically.  

The politician believes there are more urgent challenges to address in Moravia-Silesia. Together with the NGO S.O.S. Karviná, Klusová campaigned against the expansion of coal mining. Now, in collaboration with another NGO – Let’s Save the Karviná Railway Station – she is working to transform the disused station into a drop-in recreational club for children and youth. Trains no longer run on the tracks as mining has made the subsoil unstable. She laments that the Just Transition Fund cannot be used to support such projects, even with relatively small sums of just a few hundred thousand crowns.

When asked why she continues to live in an area that is often visited by journalists looking for images of “the worst place to live in Czechia”, she replies:  “Life is not worse here than it is anywhere else. We have our acquaintances, our families, our friends here. We are building a community garden near the railway station; for Saint Nicholas Day, we organised benefit rides and carolling on a little train car covered with Christmas lights there. Sometimes I tell myself we should leave, but we are staying just the same.”

Klusová claims that local citizens associate the Just Transition Mechanism with costly and extravagant projects that are far removed from their needs. One of these initiatives is EDEN Silesia, a 102-million-euro project supported by the fund for the conversion of the Barbora mine. Its aim is to create a research, educational, and commercial park designed as a group of massive greenhouses and laboratories. However, the construction of this tropical jungle in Karviná has been postponed indefinitely due to the lack of preparedness as well as objections from European evaluators. “Do you comprehend that you are discussing this type of project in a town where abandoned buildings are being demolished and where, during Advent, the debate on social media is about the theft of baked goods from people’s balconies?” Klusová asks rhetorically.

Meanwhile, Ostrava has lost one of its cherished community spaces, the Bauhaus. Between 2018 and 2024, the centre offered activities to Romani children, ran a mothers’ club, and functioned as a space for arts and culture. But the city administration decided to demolish the centre and convert it into a judicial complex to make it more lucrative. This happened despite the fact that the existing structure had won architectural awards and brought real value to the community. A new, smaller space called Placek is planned to replace the Bauhaus.

There will be life after coal

Civil society organisations oppose the building of an industrial zone next to the Leaning Church as well as a planned lithium battery gigafactory in Dolní Lutyně, near Karviná, arguing that Moravia-Silesia does not need more assembly plants for manual labourers.  “There is no interest here in that sort of jobs,” says Martin Bohoněk of Zachovejme Poolší (“Let’s Save Poolší”). “It is clear, therefore, that an investor will need to tempt a foreign workforce here. What kinds of problems will be addressed by that? They are building on the last green space in the area, but they will not be building homes, hospitals, or institutions of learning for it.” The gigafactory is planned to cover an area the size of 380 football pitches. For the Czech government, this is a strategic project, but locals overwhelmingly rejected it in a referendum in 2024.

In the Bedřiška colony in Ostrava, tenants have been complaining about an unjust transition for years amid the looming threat of eviction. Their Finnish-style single-family houses are slated to be demolished and replaced by new construction, even though the colony is one of the best examples of coexistence between non-Romani and Romani people in Czechia. The community achieved this feat without the aid of the government or any formally trained social workers, purely thanks to mutual solidarity and self-organisation. As Eva Lehotská, a member of the community, told Czech online daily Alarm: “What angers me most of all is that they are making it clear to us that there is no point in trying. People here have tried so hard, they started going to work, nobody here owes any back rent, the children tutor each other and have improved their school results, and because they are throwing us out of our homes, they are making it clear to us that all the efforts of the entire community, all the people here, were for nothing.”

In August, hundreds of climate activists – including members of Limity jsme my (“We Are the Limits”) – visited Bedřiška to show their support for local residents. These activists are among the few public figures drawing attention to the climate crisis in the Czech media. They call out the coal barons’ unfair practices and companies’ lack of decarbonisation plans, while also highlighting the social dimensions of a just transition that remain unaddressed.

This should come as no surprise. The Just Transition Mechanism was conceived as a way to mitigate exactly the sort of challenges that coal regions of Czechia – still often referred to as Europe’s “boiler room” – are facing, and to make sure no one is left behind. But so far, Moravia-Silesia’s transition has proven very complicated.

The region has been hit by successive corruption scandals involving regional representatives, has the highest proportion of socially excluded localities in Czechia, and features vast post-mining “lunar” landscapes. Regional strategies are too often created without meaningful input from those working on the ground – people trying to improve life for themselves, their neighbours, and the poorest. Instead, locals involved in civil society initiatives frequently find themselves at odds with municipal and regional leaders.

Within Czechia’s declining coal regions, there seems to be little appetite for large factory complexes. There will be life after coal here, but whether it will mean a good life for all is difficult to say.