by Giulio Meotti
Germany is beginning to ration heating, electricity in the streets and water in swimming pools. It looks like news from 1942, but instead it is from 2022 and comes from the Financial Times.
Europe’s largest and richest country is running out of energy after Russia decided to cut gas supplies, causing prices to skyrocket and triggering the biggest crisis since 1973. “The situation is more than dramatic,” said Axel Gedaschko, head of the federation of German construction companies GdW. “The social peace of Germany is in grave danger”.
“Hamburg could ration hot water,” headlines Der Spiegel.Economy Minister Robert Habeck has appealed to the population to save energy and take shorter showers. Vonovia, a colossus of residential properties, lowers the temperature of the gas heating of its tenants between 11 pm and 6 am. The district of Lahn-Dill in Frankfurt has suspended hot water in its schools and gyms since mid-September, Düsseldorf closes a huge swimming pool complex, Berlin lowers the thermostat of outdoor pools and Cologne street lighting to 70 for one hundred starting at 11.00pm.
The lights are going out on Germany (and on Europe). Italy is also ready with rationing, from lighting to heating.
But there is a deeper crisis than the energy one, invisible, which is not addressed by signing an Algerian or Azerbaijani contract, it is not measured with gas meters or bills. A crisis that binds poor Greece, rich Germany and Italy. To overcome this crisis it is not enough to ration, the battle of reason will be needed.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has just described the demographic crisis as a “time bomb”. Speaking at the conference “Demographics – The great challenge”, Mitsotakis stated that “it is a bomb, whose timer runs fast, and which we are called to defuse in time”. According to Mitostakis “it is a phenomenon that is besieging almost all European countries – I would say most, not all – most Western societies with a high standard of living. On the other hand, in the developing world we have the opposite problem, overpopulation, an explosion of births that continues to occur on continents such as Africa “. Mitsotakis speaks of “an existential question, which has been operating in the womb of everyday life for decades”.
The EU statistical agency, Eurostat, says that in Greece – where more than half of the population is already over 50 – the population will decline by 2 million within fifty years (the country now has 10 million inhabitants). In practice, a nation will be erased from the geographical map, reduced to being a magnificent archipelago rented by foreign tourists.
“Demographics: 35 percent population reduction in Greece by 2060”, the headline today in the Greek media. Abortions have skyrocketed after the financial crisis. The country is committing suicide. “Greece in 2050: a country of old people”, headlined the Kathimerini newspaper. TheWashington Post went on to tell about Kalpaki Elementary School. “13 students in first grade. Some lived in villages where they were the only ones. Half a dozen other schools in the area have recently closed ”. The Financial Times went to Roviata, near Efira: “Only 150 people live in Roviata and two thirds are retired. Konstantopoulous is one of three remaining farmers in what was once a bustling agricultural center. ‘My father had nine children, I have one, here there is a child born for every 15 deaths. In the end there will be no one, there will be no village “.
Kathimerini has just explained that Greece has two choices: to be repopulated by immigrants such as Albanians, Turks and others, losing “only” 16 percent of the population, or halving it by losing 49 percent. Greece and Italy have a similar crisis: collapse of births, aging and flight of young people abroad.
“In our time”, wrote the great Greek historian Polybius in 150 BC, “all of Greece has been characterized by a reduction in the birth rate and a general decrease in population, due to which the cities have become deserted and the countryside they have stopped giving crops “. The reason, according to Polybius, lay in decadence: “The men had fallen into such a state of indolence that they no longer wanted to marry, and if they did marry they did not want to have children, or at most have one or two”.
We live longer and we no longer have to plow the land to eat, but basically the West today is no different from that described by Polybius.
Spain is the same at a 1.24 birth rate, but the government in the last year has still obsessively approved three measures that have little to do with life: euthanasia, abortion for minors without parental consent and sex change for girls (the latter two in just one month).
Western Europe is plain crazy.