One of the biggest challenges facing any advanced democracy is not populism, nor political polarization, nor even artificial intelligence that gives so much to talk about today. It is the biological clock of its population. Demographic aging acts like a slow and discreet, but relentless tide. Population pyramids end up looking like an inverted obelisk that threatens to collapse under its own weight. And when a country dies of old age, it ends up dying in every sense.
Spain has been walking for years among the rubble of its birth rate without anyone having wanted to put order in the house. No one, in a literal sense. We console ourselves with reports, congresses, and promises that seem drafted by a committee of those resigned to walk through the Valley of Death. Meanwhile, our birth rates —less than 1.2 children per woman, at the tail end of Europe— certify without a doubt that we are a country that does not reproduce. Put more clearly: we need children, and we need them now.
The explanation for this demographic disaster could be written in several doctoral theses, although the State, apparently, has other more urgent priorities such as giving bonuses to young people who spend it on parties, or continuing to plunder the self-employed while more and more work is demanded of them.
The root of the problem is in plain sight for everyone but nobody does anything. The welfare model in Spain is of the “Mediterranean” type, that system that delegates a good part of its social services to families, without the State assuming more than a minor role, sometimes testimonial. That is to say, families act as a safety net, a nursery, a residence, and a bank. All without interest, except for the exhaustion of those who bear the cost of carrying everything at all hours.
The result is simple: if families are not given resources —sufficient public nurseries, work schedules compatible with life, or real parenting aid—, the equation doesn't add up. Having children becomes an impossible luxury, not a vital decision. And when raising a child costs time and money that one doesn't have, the birth rate drops. But don't worry, there will always be a committee to “analyze the phenomenon”. A committee paid for by everyone and that will indeed be able to have offspring.
Some hasty analysts often resort to the example of high birth rates among immigrants as a demonstration that the problem “is not economic, but cultural.” Gross error. The difference obeys a logic as simple as it is uncomfortable: whoever starts from difficult conditions perceives the renunciation of comfort in another way. In contrast, developed societies, accustomed to better levels of comfort, develop a natural intolerance to sacrifice. What was simple fifty years ago is today almost an act of valor. A leap into the void that you never know how it will end.
Furthermore, social policies, designed precisely to protect those who have less, act paradoxically in this context: those who come from lower socioeconomic levels access them sooner, and therefore assume with greater ease the arrival of more children. It is pure logic, although no one wants to verbalize it.
It is shameful to see our leaders debate about “family reconciliation”, “co-responsibility” or “new family models” with the same passion with which the protocol of an institutional dinner is discussed, while the clock does not stop. Each year there are more retirees, fewer workers and more young people who give up having children due to lack of expectations, deplorable working conditions and an endless number of related problems that no one tries to solve.
Spain ages, yes, and it does so with the elegance of one who disguises itself as progress and development while agonizing in slow motion. Because, every democracy that forgets its future runs the risk of being left without a successor. And a country without children is, simply, a country doomed to disappear.
The solution is clear: stop tormenting families with higher tax burdens, stop throwing millions down the drain of public spending on useless policies, and facilitate families' access to a greater number of welfare and economic resources. The countries in our most envied environment —yes, the Nordics— have been doing it for a long time. It's simple: one must spend on families and not on ideological nonsense that only sustains a few interested parties.
As a corollary —and not precisely a happy one— of this crisis, it is worth dwelling on the scarce progress many show in the face of the problem. And the lack of will is more than notable. While they fill their mouths with speeches about “conciliation” and “natality,” reality shows that neither public structures nor the private sector are willing to pay the price of the proposed objective nor of the modernity they boast about.
Because if there is something in which Spain is truly coherent it is in its capacity to sustain a double standard. Publicly, in interviews and media appearances, everyone is progressive and champions of social welfare. But it is enough to scratch the surface for the old employer spirit to emerge, that which considers motherhood and fatherhood little less than an organizational inconvenience. Speeches are filled with “family values” while collective agreements and business decisions are responsible for emptying them of content. See the example of the Local Police Officer of Parla who, with nine children, has been denied family reconciliation while the left governs in his City Council.
And nothing better reflects this contradiction than the fact that many workers —both from the public and private sector— have to resort to the courts to exercise rights as basic as being fathers or mothers without suffering labor reprisals. Those resources wasted before justice are resources that are diverted from the family circle. Consequently, one must have a truly authoritarian view of the world to turn birth into a reason for judicial conflict. That, or it is that those people lack descendants and do not value fatherhood or motherhood as it should be valued in these times. A shame.
Ultimately, it is still surprising that those same officials who block work-life balance measures are, at the same time, those who then wave the flag of the worker and the family in every electoral campaign or institutional act. What hypocrisy. While administrations continue to consider fatherhood a budgetary nuisance and companies see in child-rearing an obstacle to productivity, no plan will succeed in rectifying the lamentable demographic situation of this country.