By Karolina Tagaris
ORMENIO, Greece (Reuters) – Army Sergeant Christos Giannakidis was planning to have a second child when the Greek debt crisis exploded last decade, straining his finances and dashing hopes of expanding his family.
A son is quite expensive, he says, especially the cost of transport to his remote corner of north-eastern Greece, where the number of children has plummeted in recent years.
Most afternoons he takes Nicholas, 13, 50 km (31 miles) to play soccer with the few other children scattered around the region. If Nicholas needs the pediatrician, he is even more.
“To have a family nowadays, you have to become a hero,” Giannakidis said on the sidelines of a recent soccer practice. “To have a second child, more money has to come into the house.”
As much of Europe struggles with collapsing birth rates that experts say threatens long-term economic well-being, Greece is a clear example of how difficult it will be to reverse the trend.
In 2022, according to the most recent data, it recorded the lowest number of births in 92 years, due to the debt crisis which led to years of austerity and emigration, and changed the attitudes of young people. Unofficial preliminary data points to another decline in 2023.
Greece’s fertility rate is one of the lowest in Europe: some villages have not recorded a single birth for years.
The government plans to unveil new measures to boost the birth rate in May, officials told Reuters.
The plan includes cash benefits for families, affordable housing for young people, financial incentives for assisted reproduction and the inclusion of migrants in the workforce, according to officials who drafted the initiatives, including the Minister of Family Affairs.
The scope and cost of the plan are not yet clear.
However, similar measures have failed in other EU countries in recent decades, and demographers expect little difference in Greece. Even those behind the plans have doubts.
“If I told you that every minister in every ministry… can reverse the trend, it would be a lie,” Sofia Zacharaki, Greece’s minister for social cohesion and family affairs, told Reuters.
However, he said, “We have to keep trying.”
STREETS FREE OF CHILDREN
The village of Ormenio di Giannakidis and the larger municipality of Orestiada – one of the poorest in the country – reveal the scale of the problem.
According to census data, the population of Orestiada, a cultivated area bordering Turkey and Bulgaria, declined by 16% between 2011 and 2021. Ormenio was once full of children, but now two-thirds of the 300 residents have more than 70 years old, said village president Stratos Vasiliadis.
Nicholas, Ormenio’s only thirteen-year-old, spends most of his weekends playing video games alone. He wants to leave at 6pm.
“I could send him to study with my sister in Germany,” his father said.
The silence that envelops Ormenio is broken occasionally by church bells ringing over closed businesses and an empty playground, and by disabled scooters as elderly men ride to the bar to play backgammon.
Most of the church’s pews are empty during Sunday mass. The trains passing through Ormenio once carried visitors, but today they carry tanks bound for Ukraine.
A recently extended border fence in the area, part of the Conservative government’s tougher immigration policy, keeps undocumented migrants out.
“We used to meet at weddings, at baptisms. Now we meet at funerals,” said Chrysoula Ioannidou, 61. “There are very few births.”
Vasiliadis’ brother, Thodoris, a speech therapist, organizes art workshops for around twenty children from the surrounding villages. He said the isolation has stunted their social skills. One boy’s stuttering got worse because he had no friends to talk to, he said. Another walks alone through the deserted streets of the village.
Ormenio’s situation is mirrored, to varying degrees, in Greece and the EU, where governments including France, Italy, Norway and Spain have spent billions of euros on measures to benefit children, often with poor results.
The Greek economy has seen a recovery in recent years, but the decline in birth rates is, according to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a “national threat” and a “time bomb” for pensions.
PRIORITY POLICY
Even before the incentives due in May, the government created a birth allowance and tax breaks on baby items, and extended maternity allowance to the private sector.
These showed little sign of functioning.
“This is one of the most serious problems we face not only in Greece but in the EU as a whole,” Finance Minister Kostis Hatzidakis told Reuters. “It’s our priority…whatever it takes.”
Part of the government’s challenge is to overcome the trauma of the debt crisis. Just a few years ago, as protests raged against the government’s austerity policies, youth unemployment exceeded 60%. It remains around 25%.
Hundreds of thousands of young Greeks left. Those who remain are often priced out of the housing market due to inflation and soaring rents. Many live with their parents until they are 30.
The municipality of Orestiada suffered heavily. A sugar factory that provided hundreds of jobs was closed and fenced off on waste land. Dozens of other businesses are boarded up.
The primary school closest to Ormenio, which serves 17 villages, is thinning out. The entire first grade – four children – can be in the teacher’s morning embrace. There won’t be any next year, Principal Dimitris Rossidis said.
“The future doesn’t look bright,” he said.
Nektaria Mouropoulou, a first-grade teacher, says she would like to have a family, but she earns 1,000 euros a month, a third of which goes to rent a tiny apartment. She enters Türkiye to buy cheaper petrol and her mother helps her with the bills.
“When you are 30 and earn 1,000 euros, of course you will think about whether to have a family,” he said, adding that politicians were missing the point.
“Whether they give 20 euros for the first child, or 50 or 100, doesn’t solve the problem.”
($1 = 0.9232 euros)
(Reporting and writing by Karolina Tagaris; editing by Edward McAllister and Andrew Cawthorne)