The drama of the 2026 budget law, which put Giorgia Meloni’s government under pressure, seems to have forgotten part of reality. Istat will present it to us again in a few weeks, when it publishes the annual bulletin on the number of children born in Italy in 2025. The appetizer, anticipated with the births from January to July, is already indigestible: 13 thousand fewer newborns, compared to the same period in 2024. A year which, from a demographic point of view, had already been catastrophic with just 369 thousand children born. That is, a further minus 2.6 percent compared to the previous year. There were 393 thousand children born in 2022, 405 thousand in 2020, 486 thousand in 2015, the first time under half a million.

The future collapse of gross domestic product

The Minister of Economy, Giancarlo Giorgetti, spoke of a catastrophe shortly after his appointment, predicting that, without corrections, this demographic crisis will lead Italy to lose 18 percent of its gross domestic product by 2042. The deadline is not that far away: if already today all Italian men and women of childbearing age conceive a child, in order to overturn the future, in 2042 the new born would only be 16 years old. And for this very reason, unless we want to reopen the market to child labor, we are already dramatically behind. Provided that we really want to defend our GDP and Italy’s position among the most industrialized countries in the world.

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Put bluntly, it means, for every hundred euros of wealth produced today, losing 18 euros. From now on, according to multiple statistical studies, the birth rate decline could in fact lead to a reduction of one percentage point of GDP per year. We can hope for artificial intelligence and robotics to replace part of the human factor in industry and the tertiary sector. But robots don’t consume; they don’t spend on culture, sports and tourism; they do not pay contributions to the pension and healthcare system. In other words, machines, even if artificially intelligent, do not live. And a country without life, it is dead: it does not attract investments, it does not generate ideas, it does not fuel its future. It gets old. And as he gets older, he loses clarity, he fights over pennies. Maybe look to the next election deadline. And not to free fall, towards which we are happily racing.

The paradox: we raise more dogs than children

The paradox is that, in the age group between 0 and 10 years, there are only 4 million 700 thousand children in Italy today. The dogs maintained by Italian families are double: 9 million. Domestic cats 11.9 million. Small mammals and reptiles: 3.2 million. As reported by Assalco, the association of companies for the feeding and care of pets. We rightly open specialized shopping centers to stock up on feed and bedding. And we close toy shops, playgrounds, schools. Thus the day will come, ahead of this pace, when it will be the turn of businesses.

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