Can the Hard Right Find Pro-Natalist Policies that Work?

Europe's population is aging fast; and immigrants from Africa are waiting in the wings. Anti-immigrant populist parties of the hard right need to find pro-natalist policies that actually work.

"No pushchairs" by LoopZilla is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Europe is on the brink of a serious population crisis. There were 449m people in the European Union (EU) on 1 January 2023, according to Eurostat. The median age in the bloc is almost 45, while 21.3% of the population are above 65 and only 14.9% are below the age of 15.

The fertility rate is 1.4 live births per woman (below the replacement level), while the average age of mothers at the birth of her first child is close to 30. At the same time, there were just 4.2 marriages per 1,000 people per year. This combination of factors is problematic for the economy. Pensions are expensive to maintain without armies of young people joining the workforce every year; and for that to happen we need babies, lots of babies. If we don’t get babies, we need immigrants instead.

Let me share some figures from some broker research (link in Spanish) with you. Spain, where I live, will need more than 28% of the population to be immigrants by 2050, from 18% now, in order to meet its pensions bill. The amount of money that the country has to spend on pensions will grow by an enormous amount as the population gets older.

This explanation might seem a little banal to people who have gone down “Great Replacement” rabbit holes. These conspiracy theories look for sinister reasons why progressive elites allegedly support massive immigration. A little research on the looming pensions crisis would be sensible for people who find these narratives emotionally appealing.

In an astute recent essay on the case for Europe using nuclear power to re-industrialise, while also arming Poland and Germany with nuclear weapons to deter Russian expansion, American centre-left tech-optimist blogger Noah Smith has this to say:

Europe’s biggest challenge, of course, is aging — something every country in the world is either dealing with or will have to deal with fairly soon. Sadly, effective pro-natalist policies still mostly don’t exist (though France gets modest results with them) Until recently, robust immigration partially plugged Europe’s gap, but there’s clearly a giant backlash against the kinds of immigrants Europe has been taking in en masse for the past decade and a half. Even if you doubt [US Vice President] JD Vance’s motives [in taking a hard line on Europe], he’s right that European countries need to accede to the will of their increasingly immigration-skeptical populaces; to do otherwise would risk political instability.

The italics are mine. Smith’s essay raises a very interesting question. What policies can improve Europe’s birth rate? For people like me, a British immigrant to Spain who thinks there is absolutely nothing wrong with immigration, the Plan B is obvious: there are massive numbers of people in Africa, who would love a chance to live and work in the EU.

Africa’s working-age population (15-64) is expected to double to nearly 1.6bn people by 2050. Fertility rates in Africa are falling, but they are still high by European standards, at 4.2 kids per woman.

One of the themes of Sharpen Your Axe is that politics has two major games - winning elections and governance. The two are not necessarily aligned. At the moment, populist anti-immigration narratives can help hard-right politicians win tight elections, at least some of the time. However, as Smith rightly points out, once those politicians gain power, they lack tools to persuade the native-born women of their countries to have more babies.

Economic journalist Martin Wolf makes an equally interesting point behind the Financial Times paywall:

[O]ppositions are chronically underfunded. They are supported not as governments in waiting, but as small private organisations trying to win elections. But these small organisations will, should they be elected, have to provide direction to a complex state... It is a huge responsibility for which they are unprepared, both individually and institutionally. This, no doubt, is why governments start off by acting like rabbits in headlights, either delaying too long to decide what to do or leaping too quickly to ill-informed decisions.

This is not a critique of democracy per se. Yes, it has many failings. But none of them is as great as those of despotism. Yet we have to recognise that oppositions need a great deal of help if they are to prepare themselves for the tasks they may face. They need to understand the problems confronting their countries now. They need to work out reforms that might deal with those problems. Not least, they need to know how to turn aspirations into policies, legislation and institutional change.

I fully agree. If citizens are concerned about immigration, and opposition parties are making that a central theme of their platforms, states have a duty to help these parties come up with sensible and viable pro-natalist policies that might stand a chance of working. Letting politicians promise the world in opposition and then fail to deliver in power is a terrible option.

Brexit is a great example, involving opposition politicians linking up with establishment bankbenchers and populist mavericks from the Conservative Party, which was in power at the time. They promised to cut immigration to the United Kingdom (UK) after leaving the EU, but failed to do so. A fall in migration from the EU was offset by rising immigration from outside the EU. In 2024, the fertility rate of women in England and Wales dropped to 1.44 children, the lowest level since records began in 1938.

City Kids Are Expensive

Why, exactly, are populations aging? An excellent book on depopulation, called Empty Planet, says that urbanisation is the key issue. Families in rural areas tend to have lots of babies because even young kids can help out on the farm. When people move to cities, though, kids stop being seen as free labour and become treated as an economic liability instead. Women tend to choose to have fewer babies in these circumstances.

On 23 May 2007, the world’s population officially became more urban than rural, according to United Nations (UN). However, the rural population is still a majority in Africa, for now at least. This is expected to change as soon as 2033.

Regular readers will probably be unsurprised to learn that I think an experimental approach makes sense in this context. Hard-right opposition parties that are soaring in the polls thanks to anti-immigration narratives should be able to run small-scale tests at the taxpayers’ expense to see how they can improve birth rates.

I realise that this is unlikely to happen, for now, but these parties should also consider running small-scale tests whenever they win power in urban and regional elections to help them prepare for prime time. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary can also be turned into a laboratory to see if he can find effective policies that match his nativist narratives. How can society support young women who would choose to have a few kids if their personal circumstances were slightly different?

Members of the hard right who are concerned about immigration should also actively engage with feminists, who have been thinking about the difficulties of fitting female bodies into social structures designed by and for men for generations. For this to happen, right-wing populists would need to put their smears about “feminazis” on ice and actively seek out feminist voices who are worried that the sexual revolution was a mistake; as well as those who are worried about massive immigration from socially conservative Muslim-majority societies. For this conversation to work, the hard right’s concerns about immigration will have to be framed as conservative misgivings about societies changing too fast instead of reactionary bigotry.

How can hard-right parties persuade native-born young women to have more babies without any coercion? Is the problem due to housing? Would building more homes to bring down prices help? Do we need larger flats for larger families? Is it because childcare is too expensive? If so, how can we subsidise it? Do we need new cooperative childcare resources? Do young families need tax breaks? Is there a shortage of suitable young men? Have dating apps and online smut ruined the expectations of romantic relationships among young heterosexual men?

I have no answers, I’m afraid. I do suspect that career progression might be one of the underlying issues. By the time most European women start to think about having babies, in their late twenties and early thirties, they are roughly a decade or so into their careers. Many of them will be progressing at work and getting their first major promotions. Taking a break to have one baby might make sense for some. Two might make sense for a smaller number.

However, having three or more kids is always going to be a tough choice in a workplace that wasn’t designed for mothers of large families, particularly those who live in flats without too many spare bedrooms. On a related note, how can we provide more support to former stay-at-home mums who want to return to the workforce? Is there a way of crystallising the skills that parents have to develop to keep little people alive so that people with families look more attractive to potential employers? I have no idea on either point, but I would be fascinated to see the results of some experiments to find answers!

So, if you think immigration levels are too high, you should encourage the politicians who want your vote to find out what pro-natalist policies actually work. If you don’t, there is a risk that your side will crash the pension system after winning an election or two and then be voted out of power for generations. If and when that happens, there are millions of people in Africa who would love to move to your country; and people like me would be perfectly happy to support that. The comments are open. See you next week!

Previously on Sharpen Your Axe

Immigration to Spain

Two games of politics

Experimental liberalism

Further Reading

The Handsmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard

Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray by Helen Fisher

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson

Youthquake: Why African Demographics Should Matter to the World by Edward Paice

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry

The End of Men; And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

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