There is demographic news that would have deserved a press release from Palazzo Chigi, a press conference, maybe even just a tweet from the competent minister. Instead, silence. Last March 31, Istat published the report on the demographic indicators relating to 2025, and what emerges is, for better or for worse, one of the most eloquent photographs of contemporary Italy: for the first time in twelve years the population has not decreased. As of January 1, 2026 there are 58 million 943 thousand residents in Italypractically identical to those of the previous year, minus 636 units, a difference comparable to the statistical detection error. After a decade of continuous erosion, the balance is zero.
The credit, Istat writes bluntly, goes to immigration.
The bill that doesn’t add up (if you don’t include foreigners)
The numbers are merciless in their clarity. In 2025, 355 thousand children were born in Italyfifteen thousand less than in 2024, a drop of 3.9% in just one year. 652 thousand people died. The natural balance, the difference between births and deaths, is negative by almost 297 thousand units, worse even than the previous year. If this were only the variable at play, Italy would have lost almost three hundred thousand inhabitants in twelve months.
But 440 thousand people arrived from abroad, and only 144 thousand left, 45 thousand less than in 2024. The migratory balance is positive for 296 thousand units: almost exactly as much as the natural one is negative. It’s as if the country were emptying and filling up at the same rate, with two communicating vessels keeping the level constant. One is called immigration, the other is called birthrate.
Foreigners residing in Italy are now 5 million 560 thousand, 9.4% of the total population, an increase of 188 thousand people compared to the previous year (+3.5%). In the same period, residents with Italian citizenship decreased by 189 thousand units. The symmetry of that variation is almost perfect, and it is far from random.
A structural crisis, not a cyclical one
However, it would be a mistake to read these data as a sudden emergency or as the effect of the wrong policies of recent years. The decline in Italian fertility is structural and long-standing: the average number of children per woman fell to 1.14 in 2025, from 1.18 in 2024, and the comparison with the 9.5 births per thousand inhabitants in 2005 says everything about the twenty-year parable.
Istat precisely reports a self-reinforcing demographic trap: the long-term reduction in fertility has already eroded today’s generations of reproductive age. It’s not just that Italian women have fewer children — it’s that there are fewer Italian women of childbearing age. If we had France’s propensity for motherhood (1.61 children per woman in 2024), Istat data calculates this explicitly, we would still be born much less than the French because our demographic structure has aged to the core.
On a geographical level, the internal divide remains profound. In the North the population is growing (+2.2 per thousand), with peaks in Emilia-Romagna (+3.4 per thousand) and Trentino-Alto Adige (+4.2 per thousand). The South continues to lose inhabitants (-3.1 per thousand), with Basilicata in free fall (-9 per thousand) and Sardinia which, for the sixth consecutive year, holds the negative regional fertility record: 0.85 children per woman, below unity. Two Italys going in opposite directions, united only by aging.
What didn’t work (and what isn’t being said)
Since taking office in 2022, the Meloni government has made the fight against the birth rate one of its rhetorical strong points. Speeches to the nation, extraordinary commissioners, communication campaigns. Yet the concrete measures have proven to be timid: limited bonuses, one-off incentives, measures that have little impact on the real obstacle to the choice of having children, which is not the lack of an allowance, but economic insecurity, job insecurity, the scarcity of nursery schools, the cost of housing, the still disproportionately female burden of care. On the other hand, the government has built a significant part of its political identity on the fight against irregular immigration, with continuous announcements of naval blockades, international agreements, detentions in repatriation centers. The results on that front have, in fact, been equally modest.
Now that Istat certifies that immigration has literally saved the country’s demographic stability, the government says nothing. No comments from Palazzo Chigi. No statement from the ministers. No official note. Silence is, in this case, the most eloquent signal. To admit that foreigners keep the system going would be to refute years of narrative; ignoring it is simply hoping that no one notices.
The shrinking citizenship
There is a further fact that deserves attention, and which is almost hidden in the abundance of numbers. In 2025, 196 thousand people acquired Italian citizenship, down from 217 thousand in 2024 and 214 thousand in 2023. The reason is precise: the decree-law 36/2025, converted into law 74/2025, has restricted the criteria for obtaining Italian citizenship for jus sanguinisthe principle according to which it is enough to have an Italian ancestor to claim a passport.
Istat notes this with institutional courtesy, but the paradox is evident: in a country where the population of Italian citizens drops by tens of thousands of units every year, they have chosen to make it more difficult to become Italian, just as they depend more and more on the foreign presence to avoid seeing their numbers collapse. The main communities for acquiring citizenship remain Albanians (26 thousand), Moroccans (23 thousand) and Romanians (16 thousand). These three nationalities represent about a third of the total. They are people who work, pay taxes, send their children to Italian school, ask to be recognized as part of this country. The government’s legislative response has been to make that recognition more difficult.
Advancing aging
Behind the population figures there is a silent and inexorable transformation of the social structure. Italy is today the European country with the lowest percentage of children under 14 (11.6%) and the highest percentage of over 65s (24.7%). Those aged over seventy-five exceed 2.5 million, an increase of 100 thousand in just one year. Families made up of a single person are 37.1% of the total, compared to 25.9% twenty years ago. The average number of members per household dropped to 2.2.
These are not just statistical numbers: they are the description of a social fabric that is changing profoundly. Fewer families with children, more single elderly people, more dependence on welfare services, fewer workers in proportion to pensioners. The Italian social protection system is built on a demographic that no longer exists.
An issue that concerns everyone
The Catholic and social reading of these data cannot stop at political controversy, however legitimate it may be. There is a deeper question: what kind of pact between generations do we want to build? Immigration is not a long-term solution if it is not accompanied by policies of integration, recognition and civic participation. Likewise, the birth rate is not relaunched with bonuses, but with a culture and with concrete structures that make motherhood and fatherhood sustainable and desirable choices. The Istat report does not talk about politics. It talks about people: children who are not born, elderly people who die alone, foreigners who arrive and put down roots, Italians who leave. It’s about a country in transition that still can’t look itself honestly in the mirror.
Perhaps the government’s silence on these data is, after all, the most revealing response of all.
