ELSTAT's available data for the country's population do not describe a common social change. They describe a country that grows smaller, grows old and has difficulty reproducing itself. In 2024 births in Greece fell to 68,467, reduced to 2023, while deaths reached 126,916. So within a year the country's natural population decreased by 58,449 people. Weddings were also reduced, reaching 36,649, while divorces increased to 15,532. That same year over forty divorces were recorded for every hundred marriages.
That's not just statistics. It's a national warning.
Greece is facing not only a birth crisis. He's facing an institutional crisis. And the first institution we left lightly is marriage. We presented him as an old residue. We identified him with social pressure, hypocrisy, oppression and petty conventionality. We forgot that marriage has been the basic private alliance against corruption for centuries. The agreement of two people to turn desire into responsibility, attraction to duration, home thereafter.
No society survives only by rights. He needs ties. He needs free people who make commitments. The liberal does not ask the state to order citizens to marry. He doesn't believe in moral policing or state paternalism. But he believes in the truth. And the truth is that a society that discredits the stable family ultimately pays the cost in empty schools, aging neighborhoods, insurance deadlocks and political decline.
The Greeks must rediscover the benefits of marriage. Not just because the marriage is connected to more children. That's obvious, though not mechanical. Demography is also influenced by the incomes, housing, taxation, work, costs of raising, the age of first child acquisition and the general optimism of a society. Marriage isn't enough to solve the demographic. But without fixed ties, without households that can plan over time, without people who believe it is worth building common life, no birth policy can stand.
But the argument does not stop in demography. Marriage is consistently linked to better health results. Married people average longer lives, better mental health, lower levels of loneliness and better recovery after serious diseases. Obviously, some of these results are also due to the fact that healthier, more stable and economically safer people have a greater chance of getting married and staying married. But that doesn't invalidate the institution. It shows exactly how it works. Marriage gathers, organizes and strengthens resources otherwise dispersed: care, supervision, self-control, financial cooperation, social support.
The same goes for the family economy. Marriage creates economies of scale. Two people share expenses, risks, work, time and care. They can save more easily, better design, support each other in periods of unemployment, illness or occupational transition. We don't talk here about every marriage without exception. We're talking about the stable, functional marriage bond. The one who reduces uncertainty spreads the risk to two people and turns individual survival into a common plan.
For children, the issue is primarily empirical. The stable married family is, on average, associated with better educational, psychological and economic results. Children who grow up in more stable family environments have less chance of living in poverty, more likely to complete their education, better school performance and lower exposure to continuous movements, conflicts and insecurity. It's not hard to figure out why. Two committed parents can usually offer more time, more supervision, more financial resources and more continuity in everyday life. Marriage does not automatically produce good children or eliminate parental failures. But it creates, at social level, the best chances of less poverty, less instability and more upward mobility. And this, in a land that grows old and smaller, is not moral. It's a public interest.
Clearly there are many different approaches to marriage, family, and parenthood. No one needs to erase anyone's personal route. But when we are serious about what institutional arrangement produces, on average, the best results for parents, children and society, then the answer remains annoyingly simple. The old-fashioned, outdated, classic marriage preserves the primacy.
It may not like it in our time. It may not flatter the ideological fashions of liquidity. But marriage continues to concentrate on an institution what human life needs to flourish: duration, reciprocity, responsibility, economic cooperation, social recognition and stability for children.
So before talking about any individual policy measure, we need to look at the big picture of behaviour. When do young people leave home? When they form stable households. When do they get married? When they have the first child. How easily they can work, save, house, predict tomorrow. A society that delays adulthood, punishes labour tax, closes the housing market, underestimates motherhood and paternity and treats commitment as naivety, cannot then wonder why children are not born.
Greece will not only be saved with benefits, workshops and state campaigns. It will be saved when people believe again that it is worth committing, building a house, raising children, staying. Marriage doesn't solve all problems. But without marriage, no society can safely reproduce its population or its character.
