Latvia’s population is 30% smaller than it was in 1990 and by 2050 numbers will be in decline in over half of Europe’s 52 countries
hen Margarita Skangale was a teenager in the late 1970s, there were 1,200 pupils in Viļāni high school. When her son was young, the queue outside the children’s clothes shop – assuming, this being the Soviet era, it had any stock – stretched down the street.
But crucially, like many of the former Soviet states, especially those that joined the EU with its right to work and live across the bloc, Latvia – present population just under 2m – has also suffered successive waves of emigration, as young people leave for more money abroad.The net effect is a demographic double-punch.
For a town that has lost a third of its population in three decades, Viļāni nonetheless manages to look surprisingly spruce. Its white-painted, twin-towered, 18th-century church is resplendent; the streets are spotless. Covid helped a little, with some locals moving back to work from home, loving the lower cost of living and no waiting list for the nursery. But for all the regional authorities’ good intentions, there isn’t the infrastructure for big business, and there aren’t the jobs for young people.
But that doesn’t make the present one any less alarming. In a modern economy, it means “a smaller workforce, shortages of key and skilled workers, an ageing population, huge pressure on pensions, healthcare, social services”, Vārpiņa said. “We’re not really seeing it yet, but by 2030, it could start to become critical.”
As a result, Parādnieks said, the proportion of children in three-child families is rising. There are also plans to improve choice and boost state subsidies for childcare, and to reform pensions so mothers in particular do not suffer financially later in life. Some, though, are determined to make a go of it. Maija Hartmane left aged 10 with her parents, who emigrated to the UK in 2006 and found work near Peterborough.“It was the usual,” she said in a cafe in Rēzekne. “Factories, fields, warehouses. They never meant to stay, but I ended up doing all my secondary school there, then uni. I’d always assumed I wouldn’t come back, but then I had a baby, and it just felt like time.
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