Italian welfare systems are already struggling to cope with the ageing of the population, and there is no consensus on what to do about it.
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00:00Boosting the birth rate is not just an Italian problem but a Europe-wide issue.
00:07Italy has had some of the lowest birth rates in the EU,
00:10and the country is ageing at a much faster rate than other European countries.
00:14Addressing the crisis is one of the government's core policies,
00:17as well as a top priority of Brothers of Italy's EU agenda.
00:21A two-day conference held in Rome offered the chance to discuss
00:24what is being described as a cross-party national emergency.
00:28A brief interruption by a group of young activists
00:30who attacked the government's anti-abortion measures
00:33shows how very politically divisive the debate on this matter still is.
00:37Organisers stressed that a private institution was behind the event and not the government.
00:42It's a problem that doesn't affect one political component,
00:46one category of people, it affects everyone.
00:48That's why we insist on the cross-party issue.
00:50This is a matter of right, left, centre, white, black, green,
00:54immigrants, non-immigrants, elderly.
00:57Experts say that if the trend continues,
00:59Italy's population of 59 million could fall by almost 1 million in 2030.
01:04According to recent data released by the Italian National Statistics Office,
01:08the average number of children per woman has dropped from 1.24 in 2022 to 1.2 in 2023.
01:16An ageing population causes problems both to the pension and the health care systems.
01:21One of the peculiarities of our country is the persistence of this decline in birth rates.
01:28Since 2008, we have lost 200,000 births.
01:33Two-thirds are due to the lack of potential parents,
01:37precisely because they were not born 30 years ago.
01:41In 2023 alone, the government allocated around 1 billion euros
01:45for measures aimed at helping women cope with motherhood and work.
01:49It's a huge challenge.
01:50We are facing an epochal event for the entire Western world.
01:54We need to engage Europe,
01:56for example, to convene an intergovernmental conference between all the prime ministers.
02:00Opposition parties claim the government should do more to increase fertility rates,
02:05with experts saying that the latest budget doesn't include enough measures to tackle the problem.
02:11But many agree on one thing.
02:13In the last few decades, governments have failed to build a strategy
02:17to address Italy's demographic decline,
02:19or at least to prevent the country's birth rate from falling further.
02:24Giorgia Orlandi for Euronews in Rome.
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