Greece battles declining birth rate

Nicholas is 13 and his friends live far away. So that he can meet others his age, his father Christos Giannakidis from the village of Ormenio in northeastern Greece drives him 50 kilometers (31 miles) to every football training session. The debt crisis of the last decade has shattered Christos' dream of having a larger family. Nicholas, an only child, often sits at home alone playing video games.

"To have a family these days, you need to become a hero," Giannakidis told the Reuters news agency on the sidelines of football training. The family simply doesn't have the money for a second child. Large parts of Europe are struggling with falling birth rates, which can threaten a country's economic development. Greece is a cautionary example of how difficult it is to reverse the trend.

The latest figures show Greece recorded its lowest birth rate in 92 years in 2022, and there has been no sign of a trend reversal since then. The decline is attributed to the debt crisis: young people are suffering from the government's austerity measures, and many have now emigrated. Many young Greeks who stayed have decided against having children for financial reasons.

In some villages, there hasn't been a single birth for years. "We used to gather at weddings, at baptisms. Now we meet at funerals," 61-year-old Chrysoula Ioannidou told Reuters. The government is planning new measures to increase the birth rate. These include cash benefits for families, affordable housing for young people and financial incentives for artificial insemination.

The silence that surrounds the village of Ormenio is only occasionally interrupted by church bells tolling over closed stores and an empty playground, and by the whirring of the electric scooters used by older men to drive to the cafe to play backgammon. Two-thirds of the 300 inhabitants living here are now over the age of 70.

A trader in the village of Dikaia, on the border with Turkey and Bulgaria, packs up his goods at a market. The train in the background used to bring visitors to the region; today, it delivers tanks to Ukraine. An extended border fence in the region, part of the conservative government's tightened immigration policy, keeps undocumented migrants out of the area.

Thodoris Vasiliadis is a speech therapist and organizes art workshops for around 20 children from the surrounding villages. He said isolation has inhibited their social skills. One boy's stammer worsened because he had no friends to talk with. Another spends his free time cycling alone for hours through the empty streets of his village.

The situation in Ormenio is emblematic of many regions in the EU, where governments in countries such as France, Italy, Norway and Spain have spent billions of euros on child-friendly measures, often without measurable success. According to Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, falling birth rates are a "national threat" and a "ticking time bomb" for pensions.