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More people died in Europe last year than were born. Not in one country, not in one bad year. Across the entire European Union for the 13th year in a row, deaths outnumbered births. The only reason Europe's population grew at all in 2024 was because 2.3 million people moved there from somewhere else. Remove the migration and Europe is shrinking. Has been shrinking for over a decade and nobody in charge is really talking about it. That is what this video is about. Not just the demographics, not just the economics. The specific, documented, undeniable fact that Europe is heading toward a crisis that its institutions can see in their own data and are choosing to describe as a challenge to be managed rather than an emergency to be addressed while arresting people for saying so.
Let's start with the numbers because the numbers are wild. The EU population peaked this year, 453 million people. From here it goes down. Eurostat's own projections, the EU's own statistics agency, show it falling to 399 million by 2100. That is 54 million people gone. >> [music] >> Not through war, not through famine, through the quiet arithmetic of people not having enough children to replace themselves while the people already there get older and eventually die.
Some countries are in freefall. Italy has 14.3 million people over 65 and only 8.9 million under 18. Think about that ratio. Nearly twice as many old people as young people in the same country. The median age in Italy right now is 48.2. By 2050, it will be 52.9. The country's total population falls from 59 million to 52 million in the same period. Spain and Greece are close behind. Germany loses an estimated 6 million people over the next 25 years. The Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, are already deep into population decline with some of the most negative natural growth rates on the continent.
The birth rate across the EU in 2023 was 8.2 live births per 1,000 people. Italy was 6.4, Spain 6.6. These are not numbers that suggest a civilization reproducing itself. The replacement rate, the fertility rate needed to keep a population stable, is 2.1 children per woman. Italy's fertility rate is 1.2, >> [music] >> Spain's is 1.1. South Korea is at 0.7, and everyone talks about South Korea as if it is some extreme outlier. Italy is not far behind, and nobody talks about Italy.
Now, why? >> [music] >> Why are Europeans not having children? Housing costs that have made starting a family financially impossible for most people in their 20s and early 30s. Wages that have not kept pace with the cost of living for 20 years. Student debt and precarious employment, and a rental market that eats half your income before you have bought food. The specific economic conditions that make the decision to have a child feel like a luxury, rather than a natural part of adult life. We have covered this in detail on this channel before. It is the same story in Britain, in America, across the entire Western world.
But, there is something specific about Europe that makes it worse, and that is the energy situation. In 2022, Russia cut off gas supplies to Europe following the invasion of Ukraine. Europe had spent 20 years building its energy infrastructure around cheap Russian gas. Germany specifically had shut down its nuclear power plants, safe, [music] reliable, low-carbon electricity generation, in favor of Russian gas. The theory was that economic interdependence would prevent conflict. The theory was wrong. What followed was an energy crisis that sent household bills across Europe to levels that have still not fully come down. German industrial energy costs are now [music] four to five times what they are in the United States.
The result has been three consecutive years of economic contraction in Germany, the largest economy in Europe, the engine of European prosperity, >> [music] >> in recession. Manufacturing leaving for America, for Asia, for anywhere energy is affordable. BASF, one of Germany's largest chemical companies, has been cutting its European operations and expanding in the United States where energy is cheap. Volkswagen closed German factories for the first time in its history in 2024 and cut tens of thousands of jobs. This is not a temporary blip. The energy infrastructure that Germany dismantled, the nuclear plants, the domestic capacity, takes decades to rebuild. The cheap Russian gas is not coming back in any form that makes economic sense in the near future. What Germany built over 50 years is being unwound in a handful of years, and the consequences are permanent in ways that the political class is not explaining honestly.
When your economy contracts, your wages stagnate, your energy bills stay high, and your housing costs remain unaffordable, you have fewer children. The demographic crisis and the energy crisis are not separate stories. They are the same story. The economic conditions that make family formation feel impossible are downstream of specific policy decisions made over specific decades by specific people who are still, in many cases, in charge.
Now, the trust collapse, because this is the thing that makes fixing any of the above nearly impossible. Every major governing party in Europe has been devastated at the ballot box in the last 2 years. In France, Macron's centrist coalition was destroyed in the 2024 snap elections. >> [music] >> Marine Le Pen's National Rally Party led the first round. Macron's gamble produced a hung parliament and a country that cannot pass legislation. In Germany, the Social Democrats under Olaf Scholz were wiped out [music] in the 2025 federal elections, finishing third behind the CDU and the AfD. The AfD, Alternative for Germany, is now the second largest party in the German parliament. >> [music] >> In Italy, Giorgia Meloni's right-wing coalition has been in power since 2022 and polls consistently as the most popular government in Europe, not because she has solved Italy's problems, but because the parties that preceded her spent 30 years making them worse. In the UK, Labour won the 2024 general election with the lowest vote share for a majority government in history. >> [music] >> And by the 2026 local elections, they were getting 17%. Reform UK leads national polls by 10 points. This is not a political correction. This is a continent-wide rejection of the political class that has governed Europe for a generation. >> [music] >> The institutions, the parties, the technocrats who have managed European affairs since the end of the Cold War are being thrown out simultaneously in country after country by electorates who have concluded that these people have failed. And the response of those institutions to being rejected has been in many cases to look at the people rejecting them and decide the problem is with the people.
Which brings us to the free speech situation. Because this is the part of the story that most people outside Europe find genuinely difficult to believe. In 2023, police in the United Kingdom made 12,183 arrests under legislation targeting offensive communications. That is over 33 arrests every single day for things people said online. Joe Rogan covered it on his podcast earlier this year and said the UK had lost it. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, publicly warned American tourists that they could be arrested when visiting Europe for old social media posts. [music] Freedom House, the organization that tracks civil liberties globally, downgraded the UK's free speech score in 2025 because of the proliferation of criminal charges for online speech. A 21-year-old woman in Britain was criminally prosecuted for using a racial slur on social media. She herself is black. She used the word about herself. She was still prosecuted. Germany is doing the same thing at scale. >> [music] >> In June 2025, German police launched raids on 170 homes in a single morning targeting people for online posts. The German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser reported multiple citizens to the police for criticizing her on social media. Robert Habeck, the Vice Chancellor, filed over 800 criminal complaints against people who criticized him online. A journalist published a satirical meme of Faeser. She reported him to the police. He was prosecuted and given a 7-month suspended sentence for a meme. This is Germany in 2025. The country that built its entire post-war identity around never again allowing a government to silence its citizens.
Then here is the thing. The people being arrested are not calling for violence. They are not organizing. They are posting their opinions about immigration, about their government, about what is happening to their country. The specific opinions that are getting people arrested are the opinions that contradict the institutional narrative about what is happening in Europe. The arrests are not random. They follow the politics.
When you combine a demographic crisis that nobody in power is addressing honestly with an economic situation that is making the lives of ordinary people materially worse, with a political establishment that has lost the trust of the electorate and is responding by making it illegal to criticize it, you have the ingredients for something that historically does not end well. Look at who is winning elections in Europe right now. The AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Viktor Orbán in Hungary. These are not fringe figures anymore. They are mainstream political forces winning significant shares of the vote in countries that 20 years ago would have been unthinkable for them to operate in. The political class that spent decades describing their voters as extremists and deploying legal and institutional tools to suppress them has produced through that suppression exactly the political energy it claimed to be concerned about.
The brain drain is the part of the story that seals it. The people Europe most needs to reverse the demographic decline, young, educated, mobile, are the ones most able to leave and most likely to do so when economic conditions deteriorate. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Romania, Poland have all seen significant outflows of young workers to northern Europe, to the UK, to North America, to Australia. The countries at the bottom of the European economic hierarchy are emptying out. Southern Italy loses its young people to northern Italy and Germany. Northern Italy and Germany lose their young people to the United States and the UK. The UK loses its young people to Canada and Australia. This is not a flow that reverses when conditions improve slightly. When someone builds a life in a new country, roots down, has children there, the migration becomes permanent. Europe is in the early stages of a demographic hemorrhage that compounds over decades. The countries that can least afford to lose young workers are the ones losing them fastest.
Now, what is the official European response to all of this? The European Commission's own documents describe the demographic situation as a challenge requiring management. The language is technocratic. The solutions proposed are technical. More immigration to compensate for low birth rates, more labor market flexibility, more child care provision, policies that address the surface symptoms without touching the economic conditions that produce them. Because touching those conditions would require acknowledging that specific policy choices made over specific decades produced specific outcomes. The energy situation is described as a transition. The economic contraction in Germany is described as cyclical. >> [music] >> The collapse in institutional trust is described as the result of disinformation and foreign interference. The arrests for online speech are described as necessary responses to hate and extremism. The people raising the questions are described as the problem. This is what sleepwalking looks like from the inside. Not panic, not denial exactly, a kind of managed calm that insists the situation is under control while every data point says it is not.
The EU's own statistics agency publishes projections showing the population declining by 54 million by 2100. And the commission's response is to note that this is based on current trends, and current trends can change. Current trends can change. That is technically true. But current trends do not change on their own. They change when the conditions that produce them change. The conditions that produce low birth rates in Europe, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, precarious employment, expensive energy, institutional distrust, are not improving. They are worsening in most of the countries where the birth rate is lowest. And the policy response to date has been to import people to compensate for the shortfall, while arresting the people who object to that approach.
The countries that are doing slightly better are the ones that have departed most aggressively from the European institutional consensus. Hungary under Orbán has implemented the most extensive pro-natalist policy in Europe. Direct financial incentives for having children, mortgage relief for families, tax exemptions for mothers of four or more children. Whether it is working is genuinely contested by demographers. But it is being [music] tried. The European institutions have spent considerable political energy criticizing Hungary for the same policies that the demographic data suggests Europe desperately needs to experiment with. Poland, before its recent political change, had similar policies. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, countries further from the Western European institutional mainstream, have fertility rates closer to replacement than the Western European heartland that considers itself the model everyone else should be following.
The civilizational data is unambiguous. Europe as a demographic entity is contracting. The economic engine of Europe is in recession. The institutional trust that makes democratic governance functional is at historic lows. The political class is responding to its rejection by restricting the ability of the people rejecting it to express that rejection. And the official framing of all of this is that it is a set of manageable challenges rather than an emergency.
What does this mean for the next 20 years? The pension systems of most European countries are funded on the assumption of a working age population large enough to support a growing elderly population. That assumption is wrong. The working age population is shrinking. The elderly population is growing. >> [music] >> The gap between what the pension systems are designed to deliver and what the demographic reality can support is going to become visible in the finances of European governments within the next decade. Not all at once, gradually, then all at once. The political consequences of that moment when the promises made to multiple generations of European workers are revealed to be unfulfillable will not be managed by the technocratic center parties that made those promises. They will be managed by whoever is in power when the reckoning arrives. Looking at the current trajectory of European politics, that is unlikely to be the parties that have governed since the end of the Cold War.
Europe is not going to collapse overnight. Civilizations do not collapse overnight. They decline gradually. The institutions keep functioning after they have stopped working. The paperwork gets processed after the substance is gone. The official communications continue describing a managed situation after the management has failed. The Romans processed paperwork in 476 AD. The question is not whether Europe has a crisis. It does. The question is whether the people in a position to address it are willing to describe it honestly. And the current answer to that question, as measured by the arrests, the election results, the institutional language, the energy policy, the birth rate data, the immigration figures, is no. 33 people arrested every day in Britain for saying things online. Germany raiding homes for social media posts. Italy with twice as many over 65s as under 18s. Germany in recession for 3 years. European population peaking this year and declining from here. Reform UK at 10 points ahead in British polls. The AFD as the second largest party in Germany. These are not warning signs. The warning signs were 20 years ago. These are the results. Europe is not sleepwalking toward a crisis. It is already in one.