"The demographic hell" against which Vox wants to fight with a universal payment of 100 euros per month per child does not exist. The proposal, presented at the Congress of Deputies on the 19th, aims to boost birth, supported by the discourse of demographic catastrophe towards which the West is supposedly headed for the aging population. But most demographers in Spain reject this apocalyptic vision, based on false topics such as “demographic suicide” or the “fallacious” replacement fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman.
“The far right across Europe has found in the demography a streak to spread influence and create an ideological discourse whose objective” is to cover the demographic problem with what are really economic problems, protests Andreu Domingo, doctor of Sociology and deputy director of the Center d ' You study Demographics of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. "The extreme right will not tell you about the problem of young people in finding work or the poor labor insertion of women, but about the selfishness of women who do not want to have children." And to prop up this rhetoric, the extreme right, according to Domingo, refers to three false metaphors: the "demographic winter", to warn about the aging of the population; “Demographic suicide”, with which he criticizes low birth rates; and the "great replacement", to warn of the danger of immigration. All of them, explains the expert, editor of the book Demography and post-truth (Icaria, 2018), appear in the sermons of parties like Vox.
The "demographic winter"
“They have managed to get us in the head of the idea that the aging of the population is a problem, when in reality it is a blessing, because we have never experienced such a favorable demographic situation,” says Julio Pérez, demographer of the Institute of Economy, Geography and Demography of the CSIC (Higher Center for Scientific Research). “When there were 4.5 children per woman in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century, there were 18 million inhabitants in the country, and now we are 47… How can we talk about a demographic crisis?” He asks.
The key, he explains, is that "we have experienced a demographic revolution that has consisted in the fact that the people we bring to the world today live three times as much as a century ago." “In Spain, in 1900, one in five children died before the age of one year, and half had died before the age of 15,” said Julio Pérez, author of the demographic notes blog . Of the same opinion is Antía Pérez Caramés, professor of sociology at the University of A Coruña and expert in demography and migration. "The aging of the population is not at all problematic," he says. The problem, he continues, is "if there were not enough resources for the elderly."
“The aging population is a blessing”
Nor has the aging of the population jeopardized the pension system, according to the experts consulted. “The social welfare and social security system in Spain is infinitely stronger than in the sixties or seventies,” says Julio Pérez. "We have a large number of inactive population, of women who cannot have a continuous and complete career, of young people who do not get a job," problems that affect the number of contributors, adds Antía Pérez Caramés. Which demonstrates, as he considers, that the question of the payment of pensions "is not a demographic problem, but a lack of adaptation of society to its circumstances."
The "demographic suicide"
The solution, in any case, is not found in the increase in the birth rate or in the manor fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, experts agree. "This is a very easy fallacy to show, it is an absolutely wrong belief, which ignores that reproduction is not a matter of fertility, but of a balance between fertility and mortality," says Julio Pérez. "In Spain, in 1900, the fertility of those who had children was six children per woman and the replacement was absolutely disastrous," he adds. In addition, the 2.1 index does not take into account “the impact of migratory flows on the support of the inhabitants,” says Antía Pérez Caramés.
The "great replacement"
But resorting to immigrants to curb the aging of the population does not like the extreme right, which has found a reef in the conspiracy of the "great replacement." Disseminated by the French writer Renaud Camus in the nineties in a book with the same name, defends that “NGOs and the left, with the connivance of the liberal elites, want to replace the white and European population with Africans, because they are more submissive , they work more ”and they will vote for those who allow their entry, explains Andreu Domingo. And if immigrants are finally essential to pay pensions, at least they are white. "It's not that they don't want immigration, but they want an ethnic selection of migrations," warns the demographer.
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Although they seem crazy, the far right feeds on these theories. In the failed investiture debate of July 2019, Santiago Abascal baffled the deputies when he quoted communist writer Bertolt Brecht to criticize “multiculturalism” that defends the left, and that, in his opinion, “is nothing more than liquidate the identity from Spain". Specifically, the Vox leader alluded to a verse from the poem Solution : " Wouldn't it be simpler in that case for the government to dissolve the town and choose another?" And Abascal may, as he tried to imply, read the German playwright and poet. But the phrase that Brecht wrote with satirical intent and that Abascal used as a golden clasp of his argument coincidentally appears in the book The Great Replacement , by Renaud Camus, the bedside work of the European supremacists, explains Andreu Domingo.
Galicia, the demographic laboratory in Spain
The attempt to remoralize individual behaviors, through the interpellation to the responsibility of having children "is more than a century old," said Julio Pérez. Just read The Decay of the West (1918), by Oswald Spengler. However, these theories go beyond the rhetoric of the extreme right and appear in concrete policies, based on ideology and not rigorous analysis. The great example is Galicia.
“In Galicia in 2013 the first demographic dynamization Plan was approved”, with the objective of increasing the fertility rate from 1.08 children per woman to 1.59 in 2020, which meant, for the first time since the Transition “a explicitly natalist public policy, ”describes Antía Pérez Caramés. "All the vocabulary of the plan is catastrophic, with allusions to demographic winter and demographic suicide," continues Pérez Caramés, who has thoroughly studied the Galician case as a "demographic laboratory in Spain."
The plan was "very anti-intellectual", with a single academic reference, to the French Gérard-François Dumont, author of The Feast of Cronos: the future of the population in Europe, a book where he exposes the concept of "demographic winter" that has caused rage among the European extreme right. But before launching the plan, the Xunta did a survey of the population to see "to what extent it considered that demography was a problem in Spain." “The Galician population did not declare itself very worried,” recalls the sociologist. Therefore, "the orientation of the plan and the economic measures that it entailed were basically propaganda."
Promotional video of the 'Benxe Tarxeta', of the Xunta's birth support program.
Faced with the failure of this plan - the objective of 1.59 was not achieved - the Xunta proposed the Law on the demographic impulse of Galicia, which, with the advancement of the elections, cannot be debated in Parliament. In summary, the text tries to disguise the “chaste lyricism” of the previous plan and innovates in political language with terms such as “demographic impulse”, “demographic sustainability” or “demographic social responsibility”. "The most interesting thing is that he proposes that demography has to be present in everything", to the point that "all laws, decrees and plans that pass through the Galician Parliament must have a demographic impact report", analyzes Pérez Caramés . "It is a law that starts from the fact that since there is no consensus that demography is a problem, that problem must be created in public opinion," he adds.
"The great perversion is that populations are considered to be tools for the greater glory of the State, which is an intolerable archaism," said Julio Pérez. For the CSIC researcher, "birth or fertility are not issues that the State can modify, since the obligation of the State is to serve the population." And he concludes: "If there is a problem that when the time of menopause has arrived, a woman has not been able to have the children she wanted, we are facing a social problem, but never a national patriotic problem."
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