Italy loses Italians. And it is a drain: since 2015, it has reduced its weight by more than one and a half million inhabitants. It is the only major partner in the EU where this phenomenon has occurred continuously for a decade. Every year fewer children are born and more citizens leave to seek a better working life. At the same time, Italy is consolidating itself as the main gateway for immigration that seeks to reach northern European countries, but that often remains trapped in the bureaucratic labyrinth and in the streets. The extreme combination of demographic and immigration serves as an exquisite ideological cocktail for the extreme right and for parties such as the Brothers of Italy, which build around this equation a system of thought based on the increase in birth rates, obstacles to abortion, the promotion of family and the persecution of immigration.
Some, like Francesco Lollobrigida – brother-in-law of the head of government, Giorgia Meloni, and Minister of Agriculture – have raised loudly the specter of the great supremacist theory in this regard: ethnic substitution. An idea that, stripped of the violence it entails, slowly penetrates a society that has always loved its traditions and identity above almost everything and that is the focus of a good part of the ultras’ campaign for the European elections this Sunday.
The birth rate in some regions of Italy, such as Sardinia, no longer even reaches one child per woman, but it also has particularities linked to its island status. On the continent, however, the problem points to the south and, specifically, towards Basilicata. If Italy were Spain, this region would be something like Teruel. Or like any of those places that have been haphazardly called emptied Spain. Most Italians have never been to this region and will probably die without doing so. It is not a place of passage, it is sandwiched between Calabria and Campania, two poor regions, but with an overwhelming personality and cultural history. Basilicata has a gem like Matera. But it is the only stronghold that has allowed it to attract a certain amount of tourism that often prefers to follow its path through the beaches and gastronomy of the Apulia region.
Basilicata, the old and beautiful Lucania, has been a land of emigration and poverty in recent decades. “The land that does not exist”, as some Italians describe it. A noble and peaceful region of 550,000 inhabitants. “A dark land where evil is not moral, but earthly pain, which is always in things,” Carlo Levi wrote in 1943 in his autobiography of exile in Lucan lands ―Christ stood at Eboli (Alfaguara, 1980)― after opposing Mussolini’s regime. Towns perched on steep hills such as Matera, Grassano, Aliano, where the train did not arrive until well into the second half of the 20th century and which are still relatively difficult to reach. Only when in 1951 Alcide de Gasperi enacted a law to clean up and reconstruct the famous Sassi of Matera (the caves of the city that was cultural capital in 2019), was there any movement that attracted the country’s attention. And tourism.
Beyond the statistics, some commercial thermometers talk about this issue. “Every year I see fewer children buying sweets and more adults and old people filling the basket with nuts. I guess that must prove something,” explains Francesco, owner of a candy store in the center of Potenza, capital of the region (the majority of the population is in this city). Each woman in this area of Italy has 1.08 children and the average age to have them is one of the highest in Italy: 33.1 years. The demographic drop is 7.4 per 1,000, also the highest in the country. “It is normal for people to look for opportunities outside,” insists Francesco.
Worse data in the south
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The data in the rest of the country is not more encouraging. Each woman has an average of 1.20 children, a trend that prolongs for another year the decline that has been occurring since 2011. Something that also happens with the rate of emigration abroad, with 4.6 per 1,000 inhabitants (the highest high since the same date). The data worsens as one approaches the south of the country, where the lack of job opportunities and per capita income has enormous variations compared to the north: while some northern regions are comparable to the richest in Europe (around 40,000 euros) , areas like Calabria or Basilicata itself are closer to the levels of Albania (with around 20,000 euros per capita). This grievance leads inexorably to emigration and the depopulation of some areas. But the phenomenon not only occurs in the south, but throughout Italy, where 525,000 young people have left between 2008 and 2022.
The governor of the Bank of Italy, Fabio Panetta, pointed out one of the keys last week in his balance sheet speech for the year. “The exodus weakens the human capital of our country. “We are not condemned to stagnation, but we should not get our hopes up: our economy still suffers from serious problems, some deep-rooted and difficult to solve,” he noted.
The national exodus contrasts with the irregular arrival of immigrants. In 2023, taking into account coastal landings and land arrivals from the Western Balkan route, Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Serbia, 361,839 people did so. Panetta considers it vitally important, and this is the most revealing part of his speech, that “employment comes from a flow of regular immigrants greater than that estimated by Istat.” [instituto Nacional de Estadística]”. The flow “will have to be managed, in coordination with other European countries” and “strengthening integration measures.”
And that is precisely the key, or the element that a large part of the right does not share and that allows some to air the ghost of the great replacement: a theory of French origin and according to which white Catholics and the European Christian population are gradually being replaced by people of non-European origin, specifically by Arabs and Africans.
A “neo-Hitler” speech
The philosopher Donatella Di Cesare has just been acquitted by a judge for calling Lollobrigida a “neo-Hitler.” It was precisely after the Minister of Agriculture warned of the possibility of ethnic substitution in Italy due to depopulation and the supposed massive arrival of migrants. “It is true that there are entire areas in Italy, like Basilicata or Calabria, that have been emptied. And there is a very strong perception that migrants arrive and are practically replacing us. It is not expressed openly, but it is very strong. It is not said as much in Lazio or in the north, but it is in the south. Meloni’s entire party uses that element to talk about ethnic substitution,” he explains on the phone. “It is not a fantasy because many people think so. But it is absurd, an ideological approach, not a reality. These migrants do the jobs that we don’t want to do, and they do them very poorly paid,” says Di Cesare.
Meloni has focused his agenda on the idea of birth, on the exaltation of the mother as the cornerstone of the traditional reproductive family and on the obstacles to abortion. In addition to using European funds to subsidize self-proclaimed pro-life associations, or torpedoing the possibility of adoption for LGTBI couples, he has allowed the regions where his party governs to hinder the use of the abortion pill RU-486 and it is only administered up to the seventh week, and not until the ninth, as in most of Italy.
Furthermore, Meloni has found a great ally in Pope Francis – the Pontiff often compares abortion to hiring a hitman – for the promotion of the traditional family in what has been called The general states of birth. An event now promoted by the Ministry of Family and Birth, led by Eugenia Rocella, a declared anti-abortionist, champion of the “pro-life” movements and striker against the LGTBI movement.
The reality, however, is somewhat less ideological in this case. And Istat’s demographic projections indicate more prosaically that by 2050 Italy will see a notable change in the structure of its population. Rather than ethnic substitution, the institute points to generational substitution: the elderly will far outnumber the young, while the birth rate will continue to decline. And that, more than a racial or identity concern, will have an economic consequence. The big question now is: who will pay the pensions of the next generations?
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