Portugal is on “super red alert”, spiralling out of existence, with birth rates plummeting to levels registered in the Middle Ages. The grim news comes from university researcher Joaquim Azevedo, the coordinator of the country’s think-tank set up to plot the return to demographic sustainability.
Talking at the PSD conference in Viseu this week, Azevedo warned that the way things are going, Portugal will have only seven million inhabitants by the end of the century and, as such, be a country “that is unsustainable”.
Right now, Portugal has a population of 10 million, not much more than the total population of Greater London. However, there have been only 20,412 births so far this year, as opposed to 24,541 deaths.
“We will have to work for at least 20 years to invert this tendency,” Azevedo said. “But first we have to stabilise”.
The alternative is to see the country “rapidly returning to the era of the Middle Ages”, as far as birth rates are concerned, he said.
“We’re losing population, as we know. These issues are crystal clear,” he said, defending “birth-friendly policies” like tax benefits and reminding his audience that, in the workplace, women at their “fertile age” are “strongly prejudiced in businesses”.
“We face a reality that really doesn’t have much subjacent ideology,” he continued. “It’s the reality. Those are the facts and this is what is happening.”
Azevedo ended very much as he had begun, reiterating that Portugal was on the road to nowhere, demographically-speaking.
“If this is what we want, this is the country we are constructing,” he concluded.
The PSD conference had been called to discuss Portugal ‘post-troika’, with the last day focusing on demographics and social problems.
