{"id":6889,"date":"2023-10-09T14:42:19","date_gmt":"2023-10-09T18:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/?p=6889"},"modified":"2023-10-09T14:47:51","modified_gmt":"2023-10-09T18:47:51","slug":"the-battle-for-births-how-the-far-right-are-exploiting-italys-demographic-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/2023\/10\/09\/the-battle-for-births-how-the-far-right-are-exploiting-italys-demographic-winter\/","title":{"rendered":"The battle for births: how the far right are exploiting Italy\u2019s \u2018demographic winter\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Massiola is a village slowly dying, and it\u2019s not the only one. Dwindling populations are affecting the whole of Italy \u2013 will this crisis reshape the country\u2019s future?<\/h3>
<\/div>

By\u00a0Tobias Jones<\/a> – The Guardian <\/em><\/strong><\/p>

The black letters painted on the walls \u2013 announcing the \u201chostelry\u201d and the \u201cbar\u201d \u2013 are fading to nothing. Both have been closed for decades. There\u2019s no building work going on either: in one garden a cement mixer has been rotated upwards, painted yellow and turned into a plant pot. Many of the houses are empty and have hand-written For Sale signs on their front doors.<\/p>

This is Massiola, a mountain village 772 metres above sea level, west of Lake Maggiore in the northern Italian region of Piedmont.<\/p>

It\u2019s a beautiful place. Alleyways snake between houses with terraced gardens. The air smells of manure and woodsmoke. But apart from the crash of the river in the valley below and the clang of distant cowbells, it\u2019s eerily silent. <\/p>

\u201cThere\u2019s no one here any more,\u201d says one old man. No babies have been born since 2015; 23 residents have died. Since the turn of the century the population has dropped from 173 to just 117.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>

Massiola is slowly dying and it\u2019s easy to see why. It seems better suited to a simpler age: the central road is so narrow, you have to park your car at one end. Phone reception is iffy. In 2020 a landslide crashed through the middle of the village and its last remaining shop. Since then, bread has been left for residents in a cupboard under the arches of the parish church.<\/p>

It was very different in the first couple of decades after the second world war. With a population of about 350, the village had a sawmill and specialised in making wooden spoons and pins for wine barrels. There was a nearby marble mine, and tin, pewter and aluminium works closer to Omegna, a town farther down the valley.<\/p>

\u201cIt was so different back then,\u201d says Renzo Albertini, 74, the down-to-earth mayor of the village. \u201cIn the mid-60s there were two food shops, three bars, the hostelry, 200 sheep. Every family had a cow, most had a pig \u2026 \u201d<\/p>

But the marble quarry closed in the 60s and the demand for wooden pins and spoons declined. The village school closed in the early 2000s as families slowly migrated down the valley into the larger towns and cities. \u201cNo one works the woodlands now,\u201d Albertini says wistfully. \u201cThere\u2019s no life here any more.\u201d Without the young, an elderly woman adds, \u201cthere\u2019s no future\u201d.<\/p>

Massiola is a prism through which to see a slow-motion crisis that is affecting the whole of Italy: its \u201cdemographic winter\u201d. There was widespread shock in April when figures from Istat, the national statistics agency, revealed that the population of Italy had fallen by 179,000<\/a> in 2022, a 0.3% decline. Deaths now far outstrip births which last year, for the first time, fell below 400,000 a year. Shortly after the figures were released, Elon Musk opined that \u201cItaly is disappearing\u201d. According to the educational news site Tuttoscuola, 2,600 Italian primary and infant schools have closed since the 2014-15 academic year. The number of students is constantly falling: it\u2019s predicted in this academic year there will be 127,000 fewer schoolchildren nationally than the previous year.<\/p>

Demographers consider 2.1 a golden number. That\u2019s the fertility rate, the average number of children born to every woman, that allows a country\u2019s population to remain stable (it\u2019s called \u201cthe substitution index\u201d). <\/p>

Italy\u2019s fertility rate is now 1.24. In certain regions, it\u2019s even lower: in Basilicata, in the south, it\u2019s 1.09 and in Sardinia, 0.95. Every year, Italy\u2019s average age creeps up. It now stands at 46.4 and almost a quarter of Italians are 65 and over. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>

The traditional population pyramid \u2013 with a wide base of youngsters thinning to a point of a few elders \u2013 now looks more like an urn; if current trends continue, it will eventually be inverted. Projections suggest Italy\u2019s population will fall from 59 million now to 48 million by 2070, with numbers in the south and islands thinning from 20 to 14 million. Given national pension provisions are like a Ponzi scheme, requiring new contributors to finance those who take money out, this imbalance will become an acute economic problem, requiring either huge tax hikes or drastic pension cuts.<\/p>

\"\"
\u2018In the 60s there were two food shops, three bars, the hostelry,\u2019 says Massiola\u2019s mayor, Renzo Albertini.\u00a0Photograph: Andrea Frazzetta\/The Guardian<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>

Demographers and sociologists have long been aware of the problem of Italy\u2019s birthrate but it has suddenly become a hot political topic. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>

Prime minister Giorgia Meloni sees in it an issue that speaks to the gut values of the far right because it appears to confirm a conspiracy theory that Meloni, and her party, repeatedly refer to: \u201cethnic substitution\u201d or \u201cthe great replacement\u201d. In 2017 she said there had been \u201ca planned and desired invasion\u201d of immigrants, and a year later repeated the antisemitic trope that\u00a0George Soros<\/a>\u00a0\u201cfinances ethnic substitution\u201d. <\/p>

The absurd idea that a rich Jew deliberately brings in cheap labour from the developing world to reduce costs, increase profits and undermine Christian values is widely held among politicians in Meloni\u2019s Brothers of Italy party. In April, Francesco Lollobrigida, who is the partner of Meloni\u2019s sister and now minister for agriculture, linked the demographic crisis to this conspiracy theory, saying the issue of births needed to be addressed because \u201cwe cannot give in to the idea of ethnic substitution\u201d. <\/p>

Even the mainstream media stokes this paranoia: Panorama, a current affairs and lifestyle magazine, recently put on its cover various black and brown faces under the title \u201cItaly without Italians\u201d.<\/p>

Read more here<\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Massiola is a village slowly dying, and it\u2019s not the only one. Dwindling populations are affecting the whole of Italy \u2013 will this crisis reshape the country\u2019s future?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6890,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6889","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/birth-rate.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6889"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6898,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6889\/revisions\/6898"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panoramitalia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}