In Italy, Concerning Population Decline
PIACENZA, Italy — On one side of a glass wall, three toddlers in a nursery school were using play dough. On the other, three old women in a nursing home tapped the pane to get their attention.
“Let’s say hi to the nonni,” the children’s teacher said before leading them into the other room.
The children stopped to play with the magnifying glass of a delighted 89-year-old woman who had been using it to read obituaries. Then nursing home residents read picture books to the toddlers, all 2 years old.
“It’s an extraordinary thing,” said one of the residents, Giacomo Scaramuzza, 100.
Piacenza’s Elderly and Children Together project seeks to connect the vulnerable at both extremes of life. But it also puts Italy’s two existential challenges under one roof.
Italy’s population is aging and shrinking at the fastest rate in the West, forcing the country to adapt to a booming population of elderly that puts it at the forefront of a global demographic trend that experts call the “silver tsunami.” But it faces a demographic double blow, with a drastically sinking birthrate that is among the lowest in Europe. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said Italy is “destined to disappear” unless it changes.
Last month, Ms. Meloni’s government approved a “Pact for the Third Age,” which she said would lay a foundation for health and social overhauls for Italy’s exploding population of old people. Ms. Meloni added that the law would prevent marginalization and the “parking” of elderly in institutions. The legislation is wrapped into the European Union recovery fund program, which ensures that it will be enacted.
The new law will fix a system that is “a mess,” said Cristiano Gori, who leads the Pact for a New Welfare on the Dependent, the umbrella organization that advocated the law. It will streamline government health care and social services, and get government into long-term care. It also seeks to keep aging Italians in their own homes and out of institutions. A key innovation, he said, would give Italians a choice between unconditional cash benefits or larger in-kind contributions to be used for public care.
“The main shortcoming is that there is no money,” Mr. Gori said. The hope, he said, is that Ms. Meloni’s government will prioritize and fund the program. But without more young people to join the work force and pay into pension and welfare systems, the whole system is imperiled.
Ms. Meloni has made raising the country’s perennially low birthrate and helping working mothers a priority. But critics say her “Italians First” opposition to immigration hurts population growth.
Alessandro Rosina, a leading Italian demographer, said that the combination of low employment for women, the fleeing of young professionals and families, little immigration, low birthrates and increased life expectancy amounted to a demographic disaster.
Some of Italy’s regions hope to delay that disaster by prolonging the period in which older people can work, be self-sufficient and contribute, and not be a financial drain on society.
In November, Ms. Meloni encouraged couples to have children and businesses to hire women. She later announced a 50 percent increase in the “baby bonus” checks parents receive a year after a birth and a 50 percent increase in assistance for three years to families with more than three children.
“We continue to look at today,” Ms. Meloni has said, “not realizing we won’t have a tomorrow.”
But despite billions of euros earmarked for nursery schools by the E.U., Italy has delayed the start date on 1,857 nurseries and 333 kindergartens. If Italy fails to start building by the deadline, June 2023, it risks losing the money.
Mr. Scaramuzza, the centenarian, said he hoped some of the new nurseries would share space with nursing homes, as his does.
“Not having had children or grandchildren,” he said, “here, I have a great number of grandchildren.”