1 Political Demography in Postcommunist Europe: A Long Demographic Window of Opportunity, Now Closed

This chapter analyses the political and policy repercussions of recent, current and predicted demographic changes in postcommunist East Central Europe (henceforth ECE). Countries in this region are united by a common communist past. But more than thirty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they are today remarkably diverse as regimes of social policy (Cerami & Vanhuysse, 2009; Kuitto, 2016), of political economy (Bohle & Greskovits, 2012; Pop & Vanhuysse, 2004), of demography (Sobotka & Fürnkranz-Prskawetz, 2020), and, as this chapter shows, of political demography. We focus especially but not exclusively on four ECE cases: Hungary (population size 9.7 million), Latvia (1.92 million), Poland (37.9 million) and Romania (19.4 million). The latter two countries are the largest in ECE. The first three countries have been EU member states since 2004, Romania only since 2010. Like the rest of ECE, all four countries have seen a marked shift from demographically relatively younger populations around the fall of communism to fast-ageing societies approaching a nearly reversed demographic pyramid structure well before mid-century (Fig. 1; see also Goerres et al., 2020).

The ECE demographic context, while perhaps not as tragic as the severe drops in male life expectancy in some post-Soviet republics (Kazimov & Zakharov, this volume), is in some respects dramatic, too. As a result of the uncertainties, changing family values and material hardships generated by the postcommunist transition, fertility rates have fallen sharply and have remained low well into the twenty-first century (Frątczak, 2011; Sobotka, 2003). This is visible in Fig. 1 in the shrinking of the bases of the population pyramids between 1990 and 2020. Specifically, at the beginning of the 1990s, the total fertility rate (TFR) was 2.06 for Poland, 1.83 for Romania and 1.87 for Hungary 1.87 (Eurostat database, 2019). It had dropped to much lower levels still by 2000: respectively, 1.37, 1.27 and 1.31.Footnote 1 In addition, since 1990, many ECE societies have had to cope with rising life expectancy at birth and, notably in the Baltic states, Romania and Bulgaria, very significant outmigration. Throughout the post-1990 period, these demographic trends have often fluctuated significantly, and even reversed, as a result of changing external conditions (Sobotka & Fürnkranz-Prskawetz, 2020).

Fig. 1
figure 1

(Note Males are to the left [black], females to the right [grey]. Source Computations by Richard Cincotta)

Population pyramids for Hungary, Latvia, Poland and Romania for 1990, 2020 and 2040

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All three trends—decreasing fertility, rising life expectancy and significant outmigration—have had a tremendous impact on demographic trajectories and population pyramids, and will continue to do so in the next decades. Until around 2010–2015, Eastern Europe has been significantly younger than Western Europe (on which see Naumann and Hess, this volume). The old-age dependency ratio (henceforth OADR; the number of 65plussers as a share of those aged 18–64) has been rising steeply and steadily since at least 1990 in the Baltic states, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria, but from relatively low levels. And it only started increasing significantly, albeit fast now, as late as 2010–2015 in the four Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak republics) (see also Table 1). These Visegrad Four thus benefited from a particularly long and ample demographic window of opportunity to reform their policy models to better prepare for the widely predicted population ageing ahead. Even as recently as 2015, the average OADR for the ‘Western’ EU-15 member states as a whole was 32.7, but still only 26.7 for the new ‘Eastern’ EU members combined. All this is now changing fast. By 2050, the OADR is projected to increase by 25.3% points for the ‘Western’ EU-15 and by nearly 30 points for the ‘Eastern’ EU-11. By mid-century, ECE ageing processes will have essentially caught up with Western Europe, at OADR values of, respectively, 56.6 and 58 (European Demographic Datasheet, 2016). For instance, the OADR is expected to nearly double in Hungary and to more than double in Latvia, Poland and Romania between 2015 and 2040, to reach, respectively, 40, 42, 43 and 47 (Table 1).

Table 1 Overview of the demographic situation in selected countries of East Central Europe in 1990/1995, 2015 and with projections for 2040
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Poland, long one of Europe’s youngest societies, is now fast becoming one of its oldest. Compared to 1990, median age will have increased by 2040 by, respectively, 11, 14, 15 and 18 years in Hungary, Latvia, Romania and Poland. All four countries will have seen their population size shrink by then. Table 1 also sketches further components of the fast-changing demographic landscape in ECE over half a century. Between 1990 and 2040, the share of the oldest-old (aged above 80) will have more than tripled in Hungary and Latvia, and more than quadrupled in Romania and Poland. There will be more than three million Poles aged above 80 by 2040—more than the entire population of Latvia. The share of the electorally crucial group of 65plussers will have almost doubled in Hungary (to reach 25%), more than doubled in Latvia (to reach 26%), and will have gone up two and a half times in Romania and Poland (to reach, respectively, 25 and 26%). Population structures in 1990, 2015 and 2040 are shown in Fig. 1. In the decades ahead, in all four cases smaller young cohorts will need to support much larger old and very old cohorts, who, in addition, are likely to become even more powerful electoral groups (see Sect. 2). All in all, this adds up to a picture of dramatic demographic changes that, one would expect, contains multiple repercussions for politics and policies. Adopting a political demography lens (Vanhuysse & Goerres, 2012; this volume), this chapter discusses how these developments have affected the politics of age group-relevant policies such as family and work-family reconciliation policy, pension policy and ageing policy.

2 “Pensioners’ Welfare States” on the Path to Premature Pro-elderly Bias: Political Push Before Demographic Pull

With the exception of significant Russian minorities in two of the Baltic states, ECE is a region of relatively ethnically homogeneous societies. Among our four cases, Poland is the most homogeneous country by ethnicity, while Latvia has about 25% of ethnic Russians (Table 1). Yet this comparative absence of ethnically heterogeneous populations has not altogether prevented ethnically motivated population politics in ECE. Political economy (Alesina & La Ferrara, 2005) and social capital theory (Putnam, 2007) have documented the manifold negative effects of ethno-linguistic heterogeneity, both on public policies and on socio-economic variables such as productivity, growth, public good provision and other forms of social solidarity. The power strategies of the new elites in early postcommunist Latvia (as in Estonia) have actively taken advantage of the ethnic cleavages within the population by proactively remodelling the distribution of transition winners and losers along ethnic lines, as part of a post-Soviet nation-building project and to the disadvantage of Russian minority populations (Laitin, 1998). Baltic powerholders have designed public policies in ways that made existing levels of ethno-linguistic heterogeneity politically more salient, at the expense of age, class and other existing social cleavages (Vanhuysse, 2009).

In Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic, similar ethnic cleavage strategies were used to different degrees to target the smaller Roma minority populations (Bohle & Greskovits, 2012). But especially in the Visegrad countries and Slovenia, age became a politically more important cleavage line.Footnote 2 For instance, Hungarian and Polish elites have similarly reshaped the distributions of economic winners and losers in transition, but along lines of risk and age, rather than ethnicity. In so doing, they have proactively modified the subsequent patterns of distributive conflict in the polity, for instance by reducing the political salience of class cleavages and significantly increasing the electoral size and political clout of the pensioner constituency (Vanhuysse, 2009). The political consequences of the social costs of reforms, notably of large-scale job loss, can be far-reaching (Golden, 1997; Przeworski, 1991; Vanhuysse, 2008). Early in the socially costly ECE transitions to market democracy, a key political aim was therefore to try and temper these consequences one way or another. Some postcommunist governments have proactively reduced the threat of large-scale reform protests by splitting up formerly homogenous groups of at-risk workers into new heterogeneous and now-competing work-welfare status categories (Vanhuysse, 2019).

To this effect, they used public pension systems as buffers against large-scale transitional unemployment. Post-1989, Hungary and Poland, but also Slovakia and Slovenia though not the Czech Republic, have witnessed ‘great abnormal pensioner booms’ as a result of historically unprecedented exit of working-age citizens into early and disability pensions (Vanhuysse, 2006). In the first seven years of postcommunist transition alone, hundreds of thousands of working-age Hungarians and Poles were incentivized to exit into early and disability pensions by means of more generous and better protected pension eligibility conditions and benefit generosity relative to ‘younger’ programmes such as unemployment and education. These policies led to large-scale increases in the number of pensioners, with significant macro-fiscal and political-electoral consequences. Whereas the number of 60-plussers remained stable in Hungary and grew by 10% in Poland between 1989 and 1996, the number of old-age pensioners increased by respectively one-fifth and 46%. In the same period of just seven years, the number of disability pensioners also increased by one-half in Hungary and by one-fifth in Poland (Vanhuysse, 2004). In the first six years of transition alone, and at a time of still modest population ageing, the estimated share of pensioners within the electorate increased from 32 to 40% in Hungary and from 27 to 34% in Poland (Vanhuysse, 2006: 120). By contrast, the Czechoslovak, and later Czech, approach was to altogether prevent unemployment as much as possible, by continuing to subsidize firms and larger active labour market spending. But in Slovakia, 80% of new pensioners retired early by 1994, compared to just 3% back in 1990 (Svorenova & Petrasova, 2005: 127). Slovenia, in turn, was one of just three 28 European countries (with Croatia and Luxemburg) to record sustained electoral success for narrow pensioners’ parties (in the sense of polling four percent of the national vote in two or more parliamentary elections; Hanley, 2012).

This politically ‘pushed’, rather than demographically ‘pulled’, boom in pensioner numbers set in motion a powerful new political logic of “pensioners’ welfare states” (Tepe & Vanhuysse, 2009, 2012). Simply put, the suddenly much enlarged electoral constituencies now composed of ‘regular’ (post-retirement age) pensioners and large groups of new ‘abnormal’ (early and disability) pensioners made it concomitantly harder to retrench pro-elderly policies (except through grandfathering clauses affecting only younger cohorts) or to tackle special pension regimes for farmers, police, military and manifold other especially privileged occupational groups (Vanhuysse, 2006). The electoral power of elderly voters relative to younger voters in ECE can be estimated with the measure of ‘relative elderly power’ proposed by Vanhuysse and Goerres (this volume). This variable multiplies the electoral turnout ratio of elderly people (those aged 60plus) relative to younger people (those aged 18–29) by the ratio of these two age groups’ numerical sizes. East Central European countries recorded very high values on this relative elderly power measure by international comparison around 2015. In fact, six ECE countries—Hungary (with a value of 2.53), the Czech Republic (2.92), Estonia (3.04), Slovenia (3.33), Croatia (3.38) and Latvia (4.11)—ranked among the top-twenty highest values within the entire 109-country sample in our Global Political Demography database.Footnote 3

These electoral power balances of the elderly and pensioners were reflected in policy outcomes. The relative generosity and inflation-protection of pension policies in turn led to an immediate reversal of the high pre-1989 poverty trends for pensioners, relative to other age groups and to other transition risk groups. For instance, in Hungary and Poland by 2002 the relative incomes of pensioners were not just higher than they had been in 1991, they were also significantly higher than those of unemployed people and of workers with few economic resources in every single year after 1991 (Verhoeven et al., 2009: 113–4). More comprehensively, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, unlike the Baltic states, now started evolving along new pathways towards prematurely high levels of pro-elderly welfare state bias as a result of pensioners’ boosted electoral power.Footnote 4 Already by around 2007–2008, in addition to three ‘usual South European suspects’ (Greece, Italy, and Portugal), much younger societies such as Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and, most notably, Poland recorded among the most heavily pro-elderly biased welfare states in the OECD world (Vanhuysse, 2014).

Pairwise comparisons on Vanhuysse’s (2013: 27) synthetic elderly bias in overall social spending (EBiSS) ratio, which aggregates a wide range of elderly and nonelderly oriented social programmes and controls for demographic structure, are illuminating. For instance, around the time of the global economic crisis (2007–2008), the welfare state in then still ‘middle-aged’ Hungary, with an old-age support ratio of 3.9 non-elderly persons to every 65plusser, spent around 4.8 times more on every elderly as on every non-elderly citizen. But in slightly older Estonia (with a lower old-age support ratio of 3.6), the welfare state spent only 2.9 times more. Similarly, the demographically young Slovak society spent 6.6 times as much on every elderly Slovak as on every nonelderly Slovak. Yet in the comparably young Irish society, the state spent only 2.7 times as much. And Poland already occupied pole position within the entire OECD on the EBiSS by the time of the global economic crisis. In this (then) still demographically younger society (old-age support ratio 4.8), the state spent 8.6 times as much on every elderly Pole as on every non-elderly Pole. Yet in the equally young New Zealand, the state spent only 2.7 times as much (Vanhuysse, 2014). A recalculation of the same EBiSS indicator for 2010–2011 reconfirms Poland as the single most pro-elderly biased welfare state within the OECD, with Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Hungary in, respectively, 5th, 7th, 9th and 12th-highest rank (Vanhuysse & Tremmel, 2019).

In sum, as foretold in Vanhuysse (2006), these were cases where political push before demographic pull set political pathways in motion towards premature “gerontocracies” or “pensioners’ welfare states”. All five ECE countries had smaller welfare states than the ‘Western’ EU-15 average throughout the 1990s and 2000s (measured by total social spending as a share of GDP). But Slovenia, Poland (from 1994) and Hungary (from 2005) spent more on old age and survivors cash programmes than the EU-15 average despite being younger societies.Footnote 5 This evidence, like that of the high EBiSS and relative ‘elderly power’ values, strongly indicates but does not conclusively demonstrate unsustainability and inequity in how different generations are treated by the welfare state in the Visegrad Four and Slovenia. This risk of unsustainable welfare state models is aggravated by the fact that after EU accession, Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states have also witnessed ‘young brain drain’—massive emigration waves of young people voting with their feet to seek better economic opportunities and better public goods (like infrastructure and education) and higher levels of democratic governance in Western and Northern Europe. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century alone, Latvia and Romania lost, respectively, 12 and 9% of their population to net emigration (European Demographic Datasheet, 2020). Subsequently, sustained economic growth in the 2000s lowered the salience of fiscal and sustainability worries in Poland, as has a more recent refocusing on education investment and PISA tests performance (Vanhuysse, 2015b). In addition, whereas the Czech Republic also witnessed low levels of emigration for most of the postcommunist period, other Central European countries, notably Poland (though not the Baltics), have started receiving rising immigration flows in the past decade (Sobotka & Fürnkranz-Prskawetz, 2020).

3 Pension Policies: The Belated Closing of Early Labour Market Exit Windows

While the postcommunist countries in ECE have generally tended to develop smaller welfare states than their much richer West European neighbours, these were already larger welfare states than in comparably rich countries in Latin America and Asia (Haggard & Kaufman, 2008, 2009). Total social spending in 2015 stood at 19% of GDP in both Hungary and Poland, but only 14 and 15% in Romania and Latvia; significantly below the EU average of 27% (Eurostat database, 2019). In addition, the prematurely large ECE welfare states have also become prematurely elderly-oriented, as described in Sect. 2 above. Massive early exit in the 1990s has set powerful pro-elderly political-electoral logics and path-dependent reform constraints in place. In classic policy feedback fashion, effect became cause.Footnote 6 Once enlarged by political push, the electorate of pensioners subsequently became a stronger political force, constraining and biasing the ways in which governments could conduct social policy down the line (Vanhuysse, 2006).

As a result, Visegrad countries were prematurely overspending on pensions as they entered the twenty-first century. By 2010, old-age pension spending alone was 7.4% of GDP in Romania, 6.8% in Hungary, 6.9% in Poland and 8.7% in Latvia, compared to a 9.2% EU average (Eurostat database, 2021). As a result of double fiscal-electoral straitjackets and looming fiscal instabilities, pension reforms have been implemented in different years in all four ECE cases, typically affecting non-pensioners more strongly (Müller, 1999). As effective retirement ages were very low by international standards wide across ECE except in the Baltic states, these reforms typically included increases in the pension eligibility age. As a result, once the great abnormal pensioner booms of the early 1990s had run their course, effective retirement ages have gone up steadily and markedly over the next two decades. This happened wide across the region, including in the Czech Republic and the Baltic states (which did not witness such booms), with the sole exception of Slovenia (Gal & Rado, 2019).

In Poland, at a time of not (yet) significant population ageing, pension spending more than doubled between 1990 and 2014, from about 5% to 11% of GDP. Poland did not change the retirement age even during an otherwise significant systemic (three-pillar) pension reform in 1999 (Chłoń-Domińczak et al., 1999). For all insured persons born after 1948, a new defined-contribution pay-as-you-go system with notional accounts (and obligatory saving in private open funds) was introduced. But in line with Vanhuysse’s (2006) pro-elderly pathways theory, electorally powerful groups such as farmers/peasants and politically mobilized groups such as prosecutors, the uniformed services and miners were exempt, and they remain so today (Gora, 2013). In 2011–2012, a liberal government increased the official pension age to 67, by 2020 for men and 2040 for women (Clemens & Parvani, 2017). But two-thirds of contributions to the second (fully funded) pension pillar were redirected to the first pay-as-you-go pillar in 2011 (Drahokoupil & Domonkos, 2012). And again in line with the pro-elderly pathways theory, even the increase of the retirement age in 2011/2012 was reversed after the presidential elections in 2015, when the newly elected President, with the support of the right-wing populist Law and Justice party-led government, decreased the eligible retirement age to be again 60 for women and to 65 for men (Kamola-Cieślik, 2017). This decision reduced the financial stability of the pension fund and it will lead to lower pension benefits and more taxes for future working generations (Russel, 2016). It made Poland unique in Europe in actually lowering pension eligibility age at a time of faster population ageing (Goettig, 2017). The 2016 measures also announced the complete elimination of ‘open’ (private) pension funds (Oręziak, 2014). Future older generations (especially women) will not be able to count on similarly generous public pensions as current ones (Chloń-Domińczak & Strzelecki, 2013). Retired women and those employed on so-called junk contracts (from which social security contributions were not deducted) are expected to have a particularly severe risk of old-age poverty in future (Żuk & Żuk, 2018).

In Hungary, pension spending remained subject to electoral business cycles throughout the late 1990s and 2000s. A systemic three-pillar pension reform was implemented in 1998,Footnote 7 though older workers could still choose between the new mixed public–private system or remaining with the public pension (on reformed rules) (Müller, 1999). More limited changes were enacted in 2006–2007, to restrict the ability to combine working and claiming an early retirement pension and to reduce pension benefits for people taking early retirement (Ageing Report, 2009). In 2009, the statutory retirement age was legislated to increase from 62 to 65 between 2014 and 2022 (Ageing Report, 2018). Additionally, from 2011, a special allowance was introduced to give women the opportunity to retire without actuarial benefit reduction after 40 eligibility years (including years in employment or pregnancy benefit and others related to raising children)—the Female 40 law. In 2011, the two-thirds majority FIDESZ government went as far as de facto renationalizing a previously privatized pensions pillar worth around 10% of GDP (Drahokoupil & Domonkos, 2012; Kemmerling, 2013).

In Latvia, the standard age requirement for women (59.5 years in 2003) increased by 6 months each year to reach 62 already by 2008 (for men it reached 62 in 2003). In 2012, a further pension reform gradually increased retirement age by 3 months a year, until reaching 65 years and the minimum contributory to 20 years in 2025. Latvian pension legislation provides an opportunity to retire 2 years before the normal retirement age (if the insurance record is 30 years or more), but only at 50% of the full pension amount. In Romania, a three-pillar pension system was introduced only in 2007. The retirement age for men is supposed to increase from 64 to 65, while for women it will increase to 63 by 2030 but with only 15 years of contribution required (Ageing Report, 2015). Penalties for early retirement have been increased, while eligibility for disability pensions has been tightened. But here for active military police corps and special public servants within national defence, public order and national security, the standard retirement age will increase gradually only up to 60 in 2030. Early retirement pension can be granted up to 5 years before the insured person reaches the standard retirement age.

4 Pro-Family Policy as a Belated Remedy for Lower Fertility?

Family spending encompassed 1.3, 1.5 and 1.6% of GDP in Romania, Poland and Latvia in 2015—but 2.3% in Hungary, similar to the EU average (2.4%) (Eurostat database, 2019). In terms of spending effort, these ECE countries (Hungary excepted) are comparable to classic Southern European familializing countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. After 1990, ECE countries have tended to erode some of the de-familialisation elements of communist family policy regimes and have moved back towards re-familialisation with gendered policies incentivising women to leave the labour market to raise children (Saxonberg & Sirovatka, 2006: 186). Obligations of extended families have become stronger and state responsibilities weaker, in part as a result of widespread societal dissatisfaction with state intervention in family life (Appleton & Byrne, 2003: 211). The post-2000 social investment paradigm has seen significant extra spending in public childcare infrastructure and early education in Western and Northern Europe (Léon, 2016; Vanhuysse, 2015b). Not so in ECE countries. Poland and Latvia even saw a decline in spending on early, primary and secondary school spending between 2000 and 2010 (from 4.4 to 4% and 6.1 to 4.2% of GDP), whereas Hungary and Romania saw stable spending trends (at 3.9 and 2.5%) (Eurostat database, 2019, OECD stats).

However, more recently there have been indications of significant shifts in this field, too. From 2010 onward, in Poland and Romania early education and family spending acquired higher political salience as a result of low fertility rates (Sobociński, 2016). Poland has been the European country with the lowest family spending since the 1990s (around 1% of GDP). But this indicator has been rising since 2010 to reach 2.6% of GDP by 2017 (Eurostat database, 2020). Polish local authorities invested in providing better access to childcare services and pre-school education, supported by the national government in a concerted effort to activate more women via better work-family reconciliation conditions. At the same time, maternity and childcare leaves were extended to up to one full year, made accessible to a larger group of beneficiaries and made more financially generous. More generous tax reliefs for families with children and additional support for large families were also introduced (Martinez-Fernandez et al., 2013). Making good on electoral promises, the Rodzina 500+ (Family 500+)  programme was implemented by the new right-wing-conservative Law and Justice party government after its 2015 election victory. It offered financial support to all families raising two or more children, and low-income families with one child; this was later extended to all families regardless of income even with one child (Perek-Białas et al., 2017).

In Romania, the family support system was traditionally built around cash benefits, notably child allowances. After 1990, the value of child allowances severely declined in real terms (Popescu, 2014; Stănescu, 2014). But in 2008, child allowances were set at 85% of the previous wage, and the parental leave extended to up to 2 years. In 2010, austerity policies imposed cuts in parental leave benefits. The value of all cash and benefits for working parents amount to around 1% of GDP (Stanescu, 2014). Even in 2017, Romania is the second-lowest spender on family social protection within the EU (1.1% of GDP) (Eurostat database, 2020). Within ECE, Hungary was always an outlier in family policy (Inglot et al., 2012), and even more so after the explicitly conservative-Catholic and nationalist-populist FIDESZ party regained and kept on to power in 2010. FIDESZ governments have increased spending on family allowances, new tax reliefs and additional housing grants, as well as subsidized or heavily co-financed services such as daycare centres, child catering, school book supplies for families with financial difficulties and the promotion of work-family life balance.Footnote 8 As a result, Hungary’s public spending on family has been above the OECD average of about 3.5% of GDP in 2010–2013, compared to less than 2% in Poland, Romania and Latvia.

5 A Belated Active Ageing Policy Paradigm?

Long-term care policy, another domain strongly affected by demographic changes, has not traditionally been a policy priority in ECE, the occasional strategic policy document notwithstanding (Lipszyc et al., 2012; Spasova et al., 2018). To this day, this policy domain is generally characterised by low availability of care services, lack of coordination between health and social care services and a strong reliance on informal care (Perek-Białas & Racław, 2014; Popa, 2010). Care for the elderly today is still predominantly family provided as public services are either insufficient (in terms of quality or accessibility), or there is moral stigma associated with their use (Popa, 2010). But as population ageing gathers pace in the next decades (Fig. 1), this lack of political salience is likely to change. The same distinct lack of political salience used to also characterize active ageing policies in ECE (Perek-Białas et al., 2006; Ruzik-Sierdzinska et al., 2013). However, in this domain recent years have seen significant policy shifts, spurred in no small part by EU accession and the European Year of Active Ageing and Intergenerational Solidarity in 2012 (Ruzik-Sierdzinska et al., 2013).

The ECE region’s general lag in preparedness for active ageing is clearly evident in Zaidi et al.’s (2013) four-domain, 22-dimensional Active Aging Index (AAI) developed for the EU’s ‘Year of Active Aging and Solidarity between the Generations’. Poland occupied the bottom position in the 27-country sample on the overall AAI, with Hungary ranking third lowest, Latvia ranks sixth lowest and Romania eighth lowest. In addition, Hungary occupied the bottom position on the AAI’s four-dimensional ‘elderly workers’ employment’ domain index, with Poland ranking fourth lowest but Romania and Latvia ranking eighth and twelfth highest. Poland, Romania and Latvia also occupied the lowest, fourth and sixth lowest position on the AAI’s ‘participation in society’ domain. Latvia ranked lowest on the ‘independent, healthy and secure living’ domain. And Romania, Latvia and Hungary occupied the three bottom positions on the AAI’s six-dimensional ‘capacity and enabling environment for active aging’ domain, with Poland ranking 6th lowest (Zaidi et al., 2013; see also Vanhuysse, 2014). These AAI findings are congruent with a different measure specifically on children—UNICEF’s (2013) five-domain, 26-dimensional indicator of child well-being for 29 countries. Romania and Latvia occupied the two bottom positions with Hungary and Poland occupying ninth and tenth lowest rank.

In reaction to this, in Romania the concept of active ageing was promoted by the government through a range of events organized in collaboration with National Council of Elderly Persons, NGOs and local authorities. Strategic documentsFootnote 9 show a strong central government commitment to the active ageing agenda. In Poland, parliament voted in December 2013 for a new set of ageing policies, covered under rubrics such as ‘Assumptions of Long-Term Senior Policy’, the ‘Social Activity of Older Persons Programme’, and a revised 50+ Solidarity Programme (Szatur-Jaworska, 2015). The spending on these active ageing programmes had been about 15 million euro in 2012–2013, but the budget was determined by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy at up to 70 million euro for 2014–2020. New policies were also announced in Hungary in 2009 (a National Old-age Policy), in Latvia in 2014 (‘Latvia: Developing a Comprehensive Active Ageing Strategy for Longer and Better Working Lives’) and in Romania in 2015 (‘National Strategy for Promoting Active Ageing and the Protection of the Elderly for the period 2015–2020’).

The ways in which the ‘European Year of Active Aging and Solidarity between the Generations’ served as a catalyst for various government initiatives in active ageing policy for senior citizens at the national, regional and local levels is illustrated by the case of Poland. In reaction to its lowest score in the first AAI (Zaidi et al., 2013), the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, led by the leader of the Peasant Party whose constituency was mainly rural and older voters, moved to promote active ageing concepts in various ways. First, a new Department of Seniors Policy was established within this Ministry and in this way for the first time ‘older people’ were recognized in this national institutional context not linked to social assistance or pension systems. A special funding mechanism was implemented to support active ageing projects via open calls. At the Ministerial level, the Council of Senior Policy consisting of experts, seniors’ organizations, stakeholders and representatives of public institutions at various levels of governance for seniors was created opening for dialogue and consultations about the structure of senior policy in Poland (Szatur-Jaworska, 2015).

6 Conclusions: The Pervasive Political Failure to Prepare for the Demographic Elephant-on-the-Move

This chapter has discussed the political and policy processes surrounding the significant, in some respects even dramatic, population changes in ECE from initially comparatively younger societies around 1989–1990 to unusually fast-ageing societies since around 2010–2015. It is worth repeating how much ECE countries were truly demographically younger at the time of the fall of the Iron Curtain than their ‘Western’ EU members. Yet, subsequently, these societies have largely spurned their roughly twenty-to-twenty-five-year-long subsequent demographic window of opportunity for policy reform. This has prepared ECE democracies, notably Romania, Bulgaria and the Visegrad Four and Slovenia, badly for the coming three decades, as ECE has now entered a period of accelerated future demographic ageing.

Most of this was thoroughly predictable—indeed, predicted. While the size and pace of the early postcommunist drops in fertility and the post-EU-accession westbound emigration flows were arguably partially unexpected, the larger fifty-year demographic picture summarized in Fig. 1 was anything but a black swan. Rather, accelerating population ageing resembled elephants on the move: enormous, momentous, but slow in getting started. And yet, with the partial exception of pension policy, ECE countries have, on the whole, comprehensively failed to sufficiently adapt and reform their policy models to better prepare for the faster population ageing ahead. Likely reasons are multiple. They include policy overload and low levels of administrative human capital and state capacity after 1989–1990 (Bohle & Greskovits, 2012; O’Dwyer, 2004), patronage politics and other semi-corrupt political practices (Mares & Young, 2019; O’Dwyer, 2004) and, subsequently, significant democratic backsliding, especially but not solely in Hungary and Poland (Journal of Democracy, 2007; Vanhuysse, 2008), and/or much reduced elite accountability because of weak interest representation (Rozbicka et al., 2021; Vanhuysse, 2007), (younger) citizen exit, and democratic hollowing—reduced political voice (Greskovits, 2015; Vanhuysse, 2019).

This political failure to prepare for demographic change is reflected in synthetic policy or outcome indicators. Well into the twenty-first century, ECE countries mainly occupied the bottom ranks on the European Commission’s Active Aging Index and UNICEF’s child well-being index. Notwithstanding the new post-2000 social investment paradigm, they were also among the lowest spenders within the OECD on early childhood education and early human capital investment (Vanhuysse 2015a, 2015b). With notable exceptions such as Poland (which has made major strides in PISA scores since 2010) and the Czech Republic (which has consistently performed well in mathematics), ECE democracies have on the whole not sufficiently boosted the future human capital basis of their now fast-ageing welfare states. Even in the most recent PISA waves, the ‘Eastern’ EU scored lower on average than the ‘Western’ EU on mathematics and problem solving, with Romania, Hungary and even more so Bulgaria as particularly bad performers (Vanhuysse, 2015b). All four Visegrad countries plus neocorporatist Slovenia, though not the more neoliberal Baltic states, recorded prematurely high elderly bias in social spending (EBiSS; Vanhuysse, 2013, 2014). As we have noted, the former five countries have evolved into pensioners’ welfare states or gerontocracies, far along the path to premature pro-elderly bias. Their high-EBiSS values are all the more remarkable precisely because the Visegrad Four and Slovenia were, until at least around 2010, demographically much younger societies than other high-EBiSS countries such as Italy, Greece and Japan.

Given that the Visegrad Four (though not Slovenia) also benefited from a slower pace of population ageing (OADR growth) than the rest of ECE until at least 2010, and that Slovenia in turn barely managed to raise effective retirement ages, these five countries can be said to have most comprehensively squandered their demographic window for policy reform. Sustainable and balanced intergenerational resource transfer constellations are the cement of society over time, the glue that allows societies to reproduce (Vanhuysse & Gal, 2021). Premature imbalances of the kind shown in high-EBiSS values are therefore an ominous telltale, indicating a potential risk of future societal fragility. Alarm bells should ring all the louder given related trends such as the relative lack of early human capital investment and the large-scale ‘young brain drain’ from Hungary, Poland and Slovakia (but also Romania and the Baltics) since EU accession.

We have given the great abnormal pensioner booms in Hungary and Poland as a case of policies that, if anything, further decreased the degree of societal preparedness for fast population ageing (Vanhuysse, 2006). Here, early retirement massively increased the electoral weight of pensioners and the fiscal burden of pension systems, while directly contributing to prematurely high levels of pro-elderly bias in social policies (political push before demographic pull). In Latvia and Estonia, the new postcommunist elites primarily accentuated ethnic cleavages instead of age cleavages as part of a nation-building strategy to create new groups of welfare state winners and losers and target Russian-speaking minorities (Laitin, 1998; Vanhuysse, 2009). These exclusionary ethnic strategies were mimicked, albeit more for conservative-populist reasons, in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic to target Roma minorities (Bohle & Greskovits, 2012).

Another indication of how ECE democracies appear to have largely missed the opportunity for policy reform can be seen when juxtaposing the standard (chronological or backward-looking) OADR given in Table 1 with alternative forward-looking old-age dependency ratios that aggregate residual or prospective (remaining) life expectancies (Sanderson and Scherbov, 2019). In most advanced societies, in terms of physical and cognitive fitness or dependency a chronological age of, say, 70 today simply does not mean the same thing as it did three or four decades ago. In a real sense, “seventy is the new sixty”: on average, a seventy-year-old Swede or German today is actually younger (with more life years left to live) than a seventy-year-old Swede or German was back in 1980.

It is useful to compare these alternative prospective old-age dependency ratios (the number of people in age groups with life expectancies of 15 or fewer years, divided by the number of people at least 20 years old in age groups with life expectancies greater than 15 years) with standard (chronological) OADRs. Such comparison shows markedly less dramatic trends in terms of ‘prospective population aging’ for the rich societies. Even notoriously old Japan suddenly appears less gerontocratic (Sanderson & Scherbov, 2010). This means that most rich democracies seem simultaneously to be ageing fast (chronologically) and to be ageing slowly or even to be rejuvenating (prospectively). As this reflects better health policies, health technologies, healthier behaviour and lifestyles and similar cultural changes, this can be interpreted as a measure of how cultures and policy models adapt to prepare their populations for (chronological) ageing.

However, there is one notable exception to this general observation. The ECE democracies are among the few cases not to post markedly lower levels of prospective OADR as compared to the standard OADR. This is likely to reflect a host of variables negatively affecting remaining life expectancy, among them still unhealthy (especially male) lifestyles and insufficient health spending.Footnote 10 In 2015, OADR values for the ‘Western’ EU-15 members were on average 31.2 but prospective OADR values were almost half as low (17.4). This was not the case for the ‘Eastern’ EU-11, however. Here, OADR values were 28.7 but prospective OADR values only somewhat lower at 22.1.Footnote 11 In other words, as mentioned at the start of this chapter, ‘Eastern’ Europe will have caught up with ‘Western’ Europe in terms of standard (chronological) ageing by mid-century. But crucially, Eastern Europe is prospectively older than Western Europe already today. By this yardstick, ECE’s quarter-century-long demographic window has already closed. Going forward, this divergence is set to continue further. By mid-century, the prospective OADR is projected to increase to 24.1 for the EU-15 by 2050. But it will have reached 30.9 for the ‘Eastern’ EU-11.Footnote 12

All in all, as foretold in Vanhuysse (2006), this seems to add up to a particularly bleak’ generational politics’ picture for ECE in the decades to come. Modifying this picture somewhat, we have shown that since around 2010–2015, the political salience of age group relevant policies (such as family and work-family reconciliation policies and active ageing policy) appears to be on the increase. This, too, has been the result of multiple factors, including the proactive use of social policies by the same strongly Christian-conservative and/or nationalist-populist parties that have in some cases (notably Hungary and Poland) caused fast democratic backsliding—an illiberal ECE variant of welfare chauvinism. But by then, as Vanhuysse and Goerres’s yardstick of relative elderly power shows (this volume), the electoral influence of elderly voters relative to younger voters in ECE was among the highest in the world, with predictable policy consequences. In sum, the political demography of postcommunist East Central Europe from 1990 into the near future is one of long-spurned policy opportunities to prepare for fast population ageing, belatedly and only very partially realised.