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Dubravka Šuica: ‘Young people moved out and people start feeling left behind and they start blaming democracy for this dissatisfaction.’ Illustration: Guardian Design
Dubravka Šuica: ‘Young people moved out and people start feeling left behind and they start blaming democracy for this dissatisfaction.’ Illustration: Guardian Design

Dubravka Šuica: the woman tasked with solving EU's demographic crisis

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The bloc’s first commissioner for demography tells of the challenge posed by depopulation

Sixty-two years after the EU was founded on the principle of free movement of labour, Brussels is worried about how it has reshaped the continent’s demographic map.

“Depopulation is a real challenge for the European Union and for member states,” said Dubravka Šuica, who has been appointed as the EU’s first commissioner for demography in order to tackle the problem.

She recalled a recent visit to the Spanish village of Villahoz, where the population has dropped sharply in recent years. “Young people moved out and people start feeling left behind and they start blaming democracy for this dissatisfaction, having no facilities, no services in their village, no medical care, no schools, no post offices, no kindergarten.” She wants to draw up policies to help revitalise rural areas, giving people more incentive to stay.

Šuica remains a strong supporter of free movement but acknowledges the policy “might also be a problem for economies in specific member states”. Some countries will lag behind the rest of the EU, having lost some of their brightest people. “They will lack experts, intellectuals, educated people ... People go to Germany, Sweden and they fit into their economies, which means [western countries] have very good knowledge and expertise.”

The population in Croatia, Šuica’s home country, has declined to a more than 60-year low since joining the EU.

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But not everyone is convinced by Šuica’s role. Ska Keller, a co-leader of the Green MEPs in the European parliament, said the commissioner’s job title had a “weird” connotation. “Why not have a commissioner for demographic change? Because if you have a commissioner for demography, it sounds like a commissioner to produce babies.”

Keller would like to see more action to help struggling villages. She comes from Guben, on Germany’s eastern border with Poland, a town whose population has halved since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Demographic change was one of the big challenges, she said, and she voiced scepticism that the EU could play a leading role in tackling it, as Brussels does not control local services such as bus lines and post offices. “There are lots of things you can do, but it is indeed the local and national level. The European Union can support that, but you cannot tell the region what to do.”

Some experts say Brussels does need to focus on demographic imbalances, an unintended consequence of free movement, the EU’s most popular policy. “A lot of the concerns about the effect of emigration are exactly the same ones that drive fear about immigration,” said Susi Dennison, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). “So, communities changing, lack of economic opportunities, less dynamism in the local economy, this sense of being left behind. I think handling that is just really very tricky in terms of the policy issues.”

An ECFR survey in 2019 found high levels of public support for government restrictions on people leaving their country for long periods of time. In Poland and Hungary, about half of respondents supported restrictions on emigration, while in Italy and Spain the numbers were even higher (52% and 63%). In all these countries, large proportions also supported free movement.

“The failure to recognise that the world does look different in different parts of Europe is potentially quite dangerous for Europe in the long term,” Dennison said. She said support for free movement remained strong but was not guaranteed in the long run. “How you manage the impact of freedom of movement is a challenge that is coming over the next few years, and if it is badly handled then yes, it is risky long term.”

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The issue of demographic imbalance has even entered the fraught negotiations over the EU’s long-term budget. Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nausėda, said last month that his country was a “net contributor in some sense” because Lithuanians had left their homeland for western Europe. “They left and contribute to economic growth there. On the other hand, pressure on our social systems … has been increasing. So it’s completely logical to demand some sort of compensation.”

Lithuania, along with Latvia and Bulgaria, is forecast by the United Nations to be among the countries experiencing the largest population declines by 2050.

Šuica, a former schoolteacher, was mayor of Dubrovnik before being elected to the European parliament when her country joined the EU in 2013. Her nomination as commission vice-president for democracy and demography did not please everyone.

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She was criticised for voting against EU action to confront Hungary over its record on the rule of law. Šuica has said she abstained in the September 2018 vote on triggering the EU sanctions mechanism against Hungary, but the European parliament’s official record shows a no vote.

Chrysoula Zacharopoulou, a French En Marche MEP, said Šuica had taken “disturbing positions” in the past by voting against motions on sexual and reproductive rights. Šuica insists her voting record as a centre-right lawmaker will not affect her role as European commissioner. “I am for equality and I will work in a collegiate spirit of the commission,” she said.

Despite her reservations about Šuica, Zacharopoulou is convinced demography is a major topic for the EU. “Some European countries face it more than others, but this is a crucial challenge for Europe as a whole,” she said.

The MEP, who is also a gynaecologist, fears “demographic concerns are being manipulated, distorted, by ultra-conservative, far-right politicians to boost ‘European’ birth rates of only one type of family. The idea behind it is to avoid relying on immigration and to financially incentivise women to stay at home and have more babies.”

She added: “We should be very careful for demographic transition policies to remain non-discriminatory, rights-based, respectful of women’s bodies and family diversity.”

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