The French Prime Minister François Bayrou has done something rare in European politics: he’s said the unsayable. Not just about France’s ballooning debt or its sluggish economy, but about the deeper, darker truth that underpins it all. The numbers no one wants to confront. The long emergency European elites keep dodging. Europe is ageing, shrinking, and slipping into insolvency. Not because people are lazy, or because of too much public spending, but because there are not enough people. Fortress Europe, far from opening the gates to a new future, wants to shut up shop entirely.
Bayrou’s €44 billion package of cuts and tax hikes (alongside the elimination of two public holidays) has triggered headlines about fiscal discipline, debt thresholds, and deficit targets. But that’s the surface story. Beneath it is the demographic deficit. The collapse of the worker-to-retiree ratio. The slow implosion of the tax base. The unspoken fear in Brussels, Berlin, and Paris is not about bond yields. It’s about labour. About who will do the work. About what happens to a welfare state when the age pyramid flips upside down.
“White baby factories won’t save us. The arithmetic doesn’t lie.”
The fantasy of pronatalism. That a new generation of homegrown Europeans can be summoned by tax credits, crèche subsidies, and reactionary culture wars. Is already failing. Has failed. Fertility rates in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain have cratered. The pro-natalist push from the European right is little more than a civilisational lullaby. A way of singing yourself to sleep while the roof falls in. As if demography could be reversed by ideology alone. As if the future could be midwifed through coercion and nostalgia.
The budget crisis in France isn’t a French exception. The EU’s average debt-to-GDP ratio is heading for 93% by decade’s end. Defence budgets are rising under NATO pressure. Pension and healthcare costs are spiralling as populations age. Yet across the continent, parties compete to promise lower immigration and tighter borders. The contradiction is grotesque. Fortress Europe is eating itself.
“We are not overrun. We are running out.”
The right wants to talk about borders. The centre wants to talk about productivity. Neither want to face what Bayrou, however obliquely, has acknowledged: Europe cannot sustain its social model without migration. Not seasonal, exploitative, precarious migration. But permanent, equal, citizenship-track migration. A new social contract rooted in shared life, not managed decline.
Instead, we get spectacle. Bureaucratic tinkering. Cultural panic. Austerity dressed as realism. As if you can budget your way out of a shrinking population. As if fiscal rules will solve the labour gap. As if Europe’s future lies in shaving a percentage point off the deficit while ignoring the collapse in care workers, builders, engineers, farm workers, nurses, teachers and doctors.
“Fortress Europe is the great delusion of our age: a continent dying of demographic sclerosis convinced that walls will save it.”
Bayrou’s warning should be taken not as technocratic alarmism but as a political rupture. A moment when the polite fictions of Brussels collided with material reality. It is not enough to trim spending and tighten the rules. Europe must choose: managed transformation or unmanaged decline. Immigration and integration, or decline and degeneration. The numbers are not ideological. They are inexorable.
There is no white Europe to return to. No future in fortress politics. No viable path in sealing off the continent from the labour and energy of the global South. The question is not whether Europe needs migrants, but whether it is willing to stop pretending otherwise. Bayrou’s budget bombshell may have reopened the conversation about debt. But it also points toward something even more urgent: the need to reimagine what Europe is, and who gets to belong.
Let’s stop whispering it.
The unthinkable truth is already here. Time to face it.