Nations, Alfred Sauvy once argued, grow old without noticing. While the greying of society is reflected in official statistics, the renowned French demographer pointed out that this rarely enters the collective consciousness. Yet European states will increasingly have to reconsider their ambitions, and perhaps even their identities, in light of a fundamental reality — they have become gerontocracies.
The data confirms Sauvy’s warning: one in four EU citizens is now of retirement age, a problem echoed across the Channel. This demographic shift marks the emergence of a liberal gerontocracy, a system that quietly disarms many of the fears inherited from the 20th century. In a continent with fewer young people, those historically most willing to fight or revolt, the likelihood of wars and revolutions has diminished. But this same imbalance carries its own cost, forcing a retreat from geopolitical ambition and driving a reconfiguration of the continent’s social model.
Demographically speaking, Europe has long been shrinking. The EU’s total fertility rate slid to a record low 1.38 births per woman in 2023, while the share of citizens aged 65 and over has jumped to over 21% percent, a figure on course to pass one in three by mid-century. At the same time, Europe treated security as something that could be outsourced to the Pentagon. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the average Nato member’s defence bill crumbled too, to just 1.46% of GDP by 2014. Western Europe’s standing armies were cut almost in half, from 2.7 million uniformed personnel in 1990 to about 1.5 million by 2011, even as budgets for equipment and logistics have also tumbled.
Nowhere is the tension between geopolitical ambitions and demographic and fiscal reality more bewildering than in France. For if the country is leading the rhetorical charge for strategic autonomy, the numbers tell a starkly different story. Whatever he might claim, this isn’t Emmanuel Macron’s Europe — it’s Angela Merkel’s, where she warned years ago that preserving the “European way of life” would require scaling back social spending. In other words, to save the welfare state in the long run, it must first be trimmed. What defines Europe today is not the dream of positioning itself between the US and China, but the hard fact that the EU makes up just 7% of the world’s population and 50% of its social spending.
Macron’s Gaullist rhetoric and Trump’s push to raise Nato’s defence budget to 5% are, to a large extent, related. Both call for Europe to become more self-reliant in the existential domain of defence. But neither Paris nor Washington have yet reached the logical conclusion of this line of thinking. For Europe to rearm, it must either take on even more debt, which it is in no position to handle, or else tear down the welfare state. Both paths are untenable, unless some form of upheaval makes them unavoidable.
France and Germany are the engines of European integration, and without their determination, strategic autonomy is out of the question. Berlin, however, has never been enthusiastic about the idea. When Macron called for the EU to build its independence, in a speech to the Sorbonne eight years ago, Merkel demurred. Genuinely European autonomy has never appealed to Germany, which stands to gain little from it except damaging relations with its main markets in Washington and Beijing. Just last month, Europe’s capitulation to Trump on tariffs was welcomed by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who justified the unfair deal as “better than escalation”.
Could France ignore the Germans and steer Europe toward strategic autonomy? Here, Paris faces resistance not only from Berlin, but also the Mediterranean gerontocracies. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez knows that strategic autonomy comes with an eye-watering price tag for Spain’s aging society, where nearly 60% of the national budget is devoted to social spending. He called the 5% defence spending target “disrespectful” and “unnecessary”, perhaps unsurprising when his government currently allocates just 1.3% of its budget to armaments. And, already, the gradual rise in defence spending has already led to cuts in education funding and workforce training subsidies, two areas where young Spaniards stand to lose the most.
In this, Spain enjoys the tacit support of Italy. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has criticised the “Rearm Europe” programme — renamed Readiness 2030, it eases EU fiscal constraints to allow for increased defence investment — arguing that the funds should instead go towards border protection and cybersecurity. For its part, Italy faces similar economic problems as Spain, including a worsening housing shortage and structurally high youth unemployment, where a quarter of Italians are out of work. All the while, some 40% of the country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of pensioners. No wonder, then, that over 150,000 Italians left the peninsula in search of work last year.
It may have left the EU almost a decade ago, but Britain is no exception here either. As in the Mediterranean gerontocracies, redistribution flows not from rich to poor, but from precarious youth to the asset-rich elderly. Britons over 60 now own almost 60% of the country’s housing stock; the homeownership rate for those under 35 has fallen to a meagre 6%. It’s no surprise, anyway, that so many young people, right across Europe, view the future in bleak terms, postponing family formation until they can free themselves from economic vulnerability — a moment that, for too many, may never arrive.
Can France shoulder the burden of strategic autonomy alone? Even increasing defence spending to 5% of GDP would not fundamentally transform the country’s army. For decades, it has operated as a drastically reduced force, what one French officer has described as “Lilliputian in scale”. As it stands, the French army could defend a front line of only about 80 kilometres, roughly the distance from Dunkirk to Lille. No less important, France will soon face a strategic dilemma: expand its conventional forces or prioritise the modernisation of its nuclear deterrent? Whatever it chooses, European strategic autonomy will suffer, as both elements seem essential to future geopolitical independence of the continent.
“Can France shoulder the burden of strategic autonomy alone?”
Then there’s that pan-European trend. Quite aside from these military considerations, and the apathy of its neighbours, the fact remains that France is the very epitome of a gerontocracy. Next year, the cost of servicing the national debt will exceed spending on education, even as the budget deficit has just crossed the €100 billion mark. These are hair-raising numbers, but in a gerontocracy, only one principle of political economy holds: pensions are untouchable. When Finance Minister Éric Lombard remarked that it was “illogical” for French pensioners to enjoy a higher standard of living than the average working-age citizen, for instance, he faced sharp criticism. A similar outcry followed a proposal from the minister of labour that pensioners receiving more than €2,000 a month should contribute more to the national budget. In gerontocracies, though, pensioners are the most powerful voting bloc. In France, they make up 40% of the electorate, and the logic of clientelism prevails over economic reason.
Here, too, things are ominously similar across the Channel. In Britain, the electorate over the age of 60 forms a larger voting bloc than the entire 18-34 population combined. And since turnout rates rise with age, this group ends up casting nearly 40% of all ballots. No wonder the infamous “triple lock” has become a political third rail for parties right across Westminster.
As for France itself, can a country where 70% of people believe their standard of living is deteriorating really commit itself to a thoroughgoing military transformation — especially when these fears are amply backed up by the numbers? As recently as 40 years ago, the average Frenchman was about as wealthy as the average German. Today, though, he is on average 15% poorer.
Even worse, the welfare state increasingly depends on contributions from the productive segment of society to sustain itself. One major method of extracting this wealth is through the heavy taxation of labour. In this regard, France ranks second-last in Europe: if you earn a gross salary of €5,000, your employer must actually pay €10,800. Nor is any of this helped by immigration. According to estimates from one think tank, newcomers cost France around €75 billion annually. OECD data paints a similar picture, suggesting that immigration does not, in fact, deliver a net economic benefit for the French exchequer. Public sentiment reflects these worries: 71% of French citizens oppose further immigration.
The wastefulness of the French system is slowly stirring anger among the productive class, with the internet an increasingly popular medium of dissent. The popular “Nicolas qui paie” (Nicolas who pays) profile uses memes to highlight the scale of France’s social spending, and the tax burden that drains the middle class’s income. “Nicolas” stands in for the average, middle-class millennial — his British peers prefer “Nick” — who feels he’s unfairly footing the bill. This frustration has been fuelled by the breaking of a core promise of the postwar Western model: that children would live better than their parents. Gerontocracy, it goes without saying, represents the precise opposite.
“Nicolas qui paie” gives voice to a generation squeezed by twin demographic trends: “le grand vieillissement” (the great ageing) and “le grand remplacement” (the great replacement). It speaks for those forced to pay not only for one of the most generous pension systems in Europe, but also for the social spending driven by the EU’s migration policy. More to the point, this growing frustration brings Macron’s paradox into full view. Elected as the youngest president in the history of the Fifth Republic, he laid out his vision in a book called Revolution: yet he owes his rise to the electorate most resistant to change, what sociologist Christophe Guilluy calls the “protected class” of pensioners and public-sector workers.
Given all this, it’s little wonder that revolt is brewing. Certainly, disillusionment shows up in opinion polls, with barely a quarter of young French people saying they trust the democratic system. In the UK, too, 61% of young people believe that a strong leader unconstrained by Parliament or elections could “fix” the country. Taken together, such generational anger could reshape Europe’s political order. If young voters feel their voices carry little weight in liberal gerontocracies, they may look for authoritarian alternatives.
It’s clear, then, that Europe needs radical leaders willing to reverse the logic of gerontocracies, shifting away from draining the productive class to fund the grey electorate and migrants, and toward supporting the younger generation in building for the future. Reform must strike at the heart of liberal gerontocracies: overhauling the pension system; managing immigration; admitting only those who can strengthen the economy; cracking down on welfare fraud; and eliminating wasteful subsidies for renewables.
Yet cuts alone are not enough. The only viable path forward is growth. That will require deep internal reform — starting with the removal of EU trade barriers that, according to the IMF, act like a 45% tariff on goods. This must shadow an ambitious deregulatory agenda, one that challenges the bloc’s identity as a “regulatory super-power”. European gerontocracies may not notice what they’ve become, but leave things as they are and others soon will.
