Draft proposals are delaying demographic pact, says Čmilytė-Nielsen

Liberal Movement leader Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen says competing draft agreements on addressing the demographic crisis are making it harder for political parties to reach a common national accord, LRT reported.

She said the president or prime minister should bring all parliamentary parties together to discuss their proposals.

“I see people talking about the problem, but that is really the lowest-hanging fruit. Everyone says demography is a challenge and a problem. It seems to me that submitting draft agreements is now delaying a possible national accord,” Čmilytė-Nielsen told Žinių radijas on Friday.

“It would be best to have one leader. Naturally, that would be either the president or the leader of the governing parties, who would invite all parliamentary parties to sit down at the same table with certain proposals and discuss them,” she said.

According to Čmilytė-Nielsen, such a meeting would raise the issue’s profile and create opportunities to negotiate longer-term solutions.

She said many discussions focused only on increasing the birth rate, although that could not be achieved within one or two parliamentary terms.

“There are various measures for reconciling careers and family life. We liberals proposed many of them during the previous term, and quite a few were implemented, but their results do not appear immediately,” she said.

Čmilytė-Nielsen said politicians therefore found it difficult to address the birth-rate crisis and often turned to populist proposals, such as discos or one-off payments, which she said would not solve the problem fundamentally.

She stressed that discussions about the demographic crisis should also address an ageing population, which is a challenge across Europe.

“An ageing society puts pressure on the economy and creates new challenges, but attention must also be paid to ensuring opportunities for older people,” she said.

She said more attention should be given to how older people could retrain, work flexibly, combine different activities and remain active in the labour market and in society for longer. Healthcare and better care opportunities for people who could no longer remain active were also important, she said.

“This is a huge range of issues that is essentially overlooked in demographic discussions, because everyone focuses on the simplest question: how to encourage young people to marry and have children. That is a very important problem, but we must see the full picture,” Čmilytė-Nielsen said.

Parties preparing demographic agreement

In May, Lithuanian Social Democratic Party chair M. Sinkevičius announced that he would initiate a national agreement between political parties and state institutions on the demographic crisis this year, as the birth rate in Lithuania continues to decline rapidly, ELTA reported.

Parliament Speaker Juozas Olekas later told ELTA that such an agreement could be signed during the current parliamentary term.

At the end of July, the parliamentary group of the Homeland Union Lithuanian Christian Democrats prepared a draft national party agreement on demography for 2026 to 2040 and submitted it to parliamentary parties for consideration.

In early April, the Health Ministry’s draft amendments to the Assisted Reproduction Law passed their first vote in parliament. The proposal would liberalise access to assisted reproduction services, providing equal opportunities to have children for single women and unmarried couples.

The proposal would also grant access to assisted reproduction services to people who are not married or in a registered partnership but have lived together for at least one year, as well as to single women.