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At the third European Congress on Family in Dubrovnik, the ECR Party convened a panel titled “The Empty Cradle: The Numbers Reshaping Europe” to force an uncomfortable conversation: Europe isn’t merely aging, it’s disappearing from the base up. Six panelists, dismantled the comforting spin in official population statistics and argued that the crisis is simultaneously mathematical, economic, cultural, and spiritual.
Antonio Giordano, the ECR Party’s Secretary General, opened by introducing the panel before handing over to moderator Petra Mandić, Head of Most’s Council for Family and Demography in Croatia. She reframed the debate immediately: instead of focusing on the fertility rate, she asked how many people even remain capable of forming families in the first place. Croatia recorded roughly 32,000 births in 2024, the lowest ever, despite a fertility rate of 1.46 sitting above the EU average of 1.34. Her explanation: the “base” is collapsing. Croatia lost about 125,000 women aged 20–39, more than one in five, between 2011 and 2025 in what she called “the mathematics of disappearance.” She invoked Hannah Arendt’s idea of natality and Roger Scruton’s writing on family continuity, framing this as a question of whether society can still renew itself, and flagged that nearly two-thirds of Croatians aged 25–34 still live with their parents, the EU’s highest rate.
Sara Bogdan Bešlić, Croatian municipal councillor, farmer, and mother of three, delivered the sharpest critique of how demographic data gets spun. The EU recorded 3.46 million births against 4.81 million deaths, a natural decline of 1.35 million, yet adding roughly 2 million migrants let officials present a net increase of 700,000 as growth. In Croatia, 32,000 births against 50,000 deaths meant an 18,000-person shortfall; every one of Croatia’s 20 counties posted negative natural change, and only 43 of its 555 municipalities grew naturally. Still, headlines touted a population increase. “We add migration as a statistical adjustment,” she said, “and make demographic winter look like spring.” She also argued migration skews heavily male, doing little to address who will actually give birth to the next generation, and later, prompted by a question from Lloyd Opdam of ECR Youth about Europe’s projected 3.4% share of world population by 2100, she called reliance on immigration more dangerous than population decline itself, pointing to Poland as a model and describing her own experience marrying at 19 and having her first child at 20 despite social disapproval.
Jorge Jraissati, President of the Economic Inclusion Group, a Venezuelan-led think tank active across Latin America, the U.S., and Europe, framed the crisis as both economic and cultural. Overregulation from Brussels, he argued, makes it exceptionally hard for young Europeans to build financial stability, while a steady drumbeat of academic pessimism about environmental and civilizational collapse makes childbearing feel irresponsible rather than hopeful. He warned Europe is on track to lose 2 million workers annually, making the welfare state unsustainable, and proposed tax deductions for young parents, easier mortgage and business credit, and bankruptcy reform to encourage entrepreneurship, essentially making family formation and risk-taking “popular” again through policy.
Elina Treija, Chairwoman of the Union of Latvian Large Families and a Riga City Councillor chairing its Housing Committee, brought the most concrete policy detail. She outlined guaranteed affordable municipal rentals scaled to family size, state-backed mortgage guarantees (up to €50,000 for three-child families), and down-payment grants of €8,000–€10,000. She argued support shouldn’t target only low-income households, since middle- and higher-income families often face the steepest trade-offs when weighing another child. Her most novel proposal: state grants that reduce a family’s existing mortgage balance with each new birth, offsetting the income hit that often derails family plans. She noted that when Latvia’s large-family incentives launched, third-or-later births rose from 15% to 25% of all newborns. Real evidence policy can shift behavior, even as inflation has since eroded the support’s value.
Mihovil Klarić, a religious education teacher from Croatia, offered the panel’s most philosophical intervention, drawing on Charles Taylor, Max Weber, and Alexis de Tocqueville. He argued Europe has spent thirty years treating the wrong illness by focusing on financial “supply” instead of the collapse in desire itself, describing modern life as a comfortable cage: self-focused, transactional, and passively dependent on the state. His closing image gave the panel its title: “We have filled the cages and emptied the cradles.”
Closing the session, Fabrizio Masia of EMG presented Eurostat-based research confirming the panel’s warnings: EU births fell from over 5 million in 1990 to today’s collapsed figures, with ten countries now below a 1.30 fertility rate, a threshold no country had reached in 1990. Projections show Europe’s population stabilizing near 453 million by 2029 before falling below 400 million by 2100, smaller than the United States and likely smaller than Nigeria alone. Crucially, Masia’s data confirmed the “desire gap” panelists described: Czech women want 2.2–2.4 children but have only 1–1.4, and an Italian survey found 68% of women wanted two or more children. He also identified a striking correlation: the later young people leave their parental home, ranging from 21.3 in Finland to roughly 30–31 in Croatia and Italy, the lower a country’s fertility rate, with a correlation coefficient of minus 0.7. His conclusion echoed the panel’s: stable housing, secure employment, and structural policy are what will let Europeans close the gap between the families they want and the families they have.