Elon Musk posted on X that in 21 of the European Union's 27 countries more people die than are born and that those states have "long been heading towards extinction". The reaction came to Financial Times data based on United Nations statistics, showing decades of falling birth rates in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and the United States.

The figures are not disputed and they are not new. The EU fertility rate fell in 2024 to 1.34 children per woman - a historic low, while simple population replacement requires around 2.1. That year 3.55 million children were born in the Union. In 1964 the figure was 6.8 million. Almost halved, in sixty years.

The consequences are no longer a forecast but a description of the present. Japan, China, Italy and much of Central and Eastern Europe are losing population. France recorded more deaths than births for the first time since the end of the Second World War. In South Korea, where fertility has fallen to around 0.7, nurseries are being converted into care homes for the elderly and wedding halls into funeral parlours. It is hard to think of a more concrete image than that.

Why this is not somebody else's subject

There is something here that needs no explaining in the Balkans. The empty classroom is not an abstraction - it is something plenty of families in this region have watched happen in their own village. The difference is that the Western European demographic crisis is measured by the fertility rate, and ours also by how many people left. The result ends up looking the same: fewer children, more empty desks.

And here Musk, who has warned for years that low birth rates are one of the greatest dangers to civilisation, states the problem accurately but closes it too early. The numbers are true. What he leaves out is that having a child today is as much an economic decision as a personal one - rent, working hours, the price of childcare, whether anyone will be home at all. Countries that tried a one-off payment for a third child learned that the hard way.

One thing is clear all the same: since 2012 natural growth across the Union has been negative, and total population rises solely through immigration. So the very states arguing over how to seal their borders do not, mathematically, exist without the people coming through them. Has anyone leading that argument run the sum all the way to the end?