Germany has spent decades as Europe’s industrial anchor, yet its future now turns on a blunt piece of arithmetic. The country is greying faster than it can adjust, and even extreme levels of immigration may not be enough to keep the economic model alive.
Geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan puts it in stark terms in a conversation with Chris Williamson. Looking at the global demographic map, he argues that China sits in the worst position, with ageing Europe close behind. “China probably, with the data we have right now, is in the worst shape and after that it’s a kind of a three-way tie between or among Germany, Italy and Korea most likely.”
The problem is not abstract. It shows up in the age structure of the population: too many people in their fifties and sixties, too few in their twenties and thirties. For a modern economy, those younger cohorts are the ones who work, spend, start families, pay taxes and keep the pension system afloat. When they thin out, the system still looks normal for a while, then the pressure suddenly becomes visible in labour shortages, rising welfare bills and political anger.
This is where Zeihan’s German number lands like a brick. To stop the slide, he says, Berlin would need a volume of young newcomers that would transform the country beyond recognition.
“So let’s just take Germany, because the numbers there are really clear and the Germans are great with numbers, so we can trust them. You know, the Germans, just to hold where they are, average age of like 50, just to hold here, already export dependent, just to not slide any more, they need to bring in 2 million people a year that are under age 25, forever, in a country that only has 80 million people.”
Two million under-25s every year, indefinitely, into a state of around 80 million residents. “Fast forward 20 years and the Germans are less than a third of the population. It’s not viable anymore,” he adds. That is less an immigration policy than a complete demographic replacement.
The headline figure captures a wider point about timing. Immigration can help, but only if it is embedded early and consistently over generations. “At this point in time, it’s at best like a really thin cane,” Zeihan says of migration as a fix for ageing societies. “If you, if your goal is to use someone else’s young people to pad your demographic so you don’t fade away, you need to start before you have a problem.”
That, in his view, is why classic settler societies such as Australia, Canada and the United States have more room to manoeuvre. “This is one of the reasons why the settler societies have always had faster growth than the rest of the world. So the Aussies, the Kiwis, the Americans, the Canadians, this has been less of a problem for us because none of us are from where we’re living now. And we’ve been bringing in waves of people over and over, decade after decade, into the centuries.”
“If your goal is to use someone else’s young people to pad your demographic so you don’t fade away, you need to start before you have a problem”
Germany did bring in workers in earlier decades, from Italian and Greek labourers to Turkish families and more recent arrivals from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Yet it did so while insisting, at least formally, that it was not a country of immigration. The numbers were never large enough, or early enough, to reshape the age curve in the way Zeihan says would now be needed.
There is also a political ceiling. The kind of mass intake required to hold the current age profile would strain any society. Zeihan’s thought experiment has the foreign-born majority arriving in just two decades. Even in more open countries, voters are already nervous about much smaller flows.
That is why he draws a line between states that still have a sizeable pool of people in their thirties and those that have crossed the threshold into permanent shrinkage. Countries such as India, Mexico, Poland and Brazil, he says, “have not passed that Rubicon just yet” and “don’t require a reinvention”. They can, in theory, nudge policy so that young citizens feel comfortable having children.
Once the average age pushes into the mid-forties, the task changes. “There’s no longer a traditional biological path. It’s about smoothing the decline, stretching it out. And a number of European states have proven to be very good at that. Japan has proven to be surprisingly good at that, but it’s still a bit of a starvation diet in the long run unless you change the economic model.”
“Classic settler societies such as Australia, Canada and the United States have more room to manoeuvre”
That “starvation diet” is what Germany now faces. An export machine needs customers abroad and workers at home. Zeihan’s broader argument is that the world itself is becoming older and more fractious, with fewer young consumers in key markets and more states turning inward. In that environment, countries that rely heavily on foreign demand and lack youthful domestic populations will find their room to move getting tighter each year.
Inside ageing societies, politics also warps. Young people become fewer in number, older people more dominant at the ballot box. Zeihan sketches the dynamic this way: “the young cohort is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and more brittle and more desperate, whereas the older cohort is getting larger and larger and larger and more ossified and more unwilling to make any compromises.” The risk is a stand-off between generations at exactly the moment when compromise is needed to rethink pensions, work, housing and family policy.
Germany is not alone in this bind. Japan has spent three decades trying to ease the pressure, keeping older workers in the labour force and supporting families, and “their birth rate has actually risen quite a bit” by Zeihan’s measure, even if it remains well below replacement. South Korea and Italy are in the same demographic bracket as Germany, but with their own political constraints on migration and reform.
“Countries such as India, Mexico, Poland and Brazil, he argues, “have not passed that Rubicon just yet” and “don’t require a reinvention”, suggesting they can still shape policy in ways that make younger generations feel confident about starting families”
Against that backdrop, Zeihan sees the United States in an oddly privileged spot. It has its own ageing issues, yet its population is younger than most rich countries and it sits in a Western Hemisphere that is relatively stable in security terms. “America doesn’t win the next era because it’s brilliant. It wins because everyone else is screwed,” he says. Crude, but in his view accurate.
For Germany, there is no simple electoral slogan that fixes the mathematics he describes. Smaller, targeted migration, later retirement, productivity gains and tech adoption can all help, but they do not erase the fact that decades of low birth rates are now baked into the country’s age structure. The choice is less about avoiding adjustment and more about how calmly, or chaotically, that adjustment unfolds.
Demography moves slowly, then seems to change everything at once. The unsettling part of Zeihan’s argument is that by the time a society realises that it would like another generation of thirty-somethings, there is no way to conjure them out of thin air. Germany’s numbers, in that sense, are not a forecast; they are already the starting point.
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