Some weeks ago, when I wrote about Noviodunum, the Roman town that became Nyon, I kept picturing how empty the shores of Lake Geneva must have been back in Roman times. Today it feels like the opposite. Switzerland now has about 9.1 million people, 2.7 times as many as in 1900, according to the About Switzerland population page from the Swiss foreign ministry.

Most of that growth comes from immigration. More than 2 million foreign nationals (raising my hand here) live in Switzerland, about 27% of residents, one of the highest shares in Europe. The flow also runs the other way: over 10% of Swiss citizens now live abroad. In recent years the population has grown about 0.8% a year, and 2025 alone added roughly 73,300 people.

All of this came to a head in June. On 14 June 2026, voters rejected the SVP’s “No to 10 million Switzerland!” initiative, which would have forced the government to act if the population passed 10 million before 2050. It failed 54.8% to 45.2%. The map was telling: French-speaking cantons and the big cities said no (Bern 83.6%, Zurich 75.9%), while rural cantons like Appenzell Innerrhoden and Schwyz said yes.

So what now? At 0.8% a year, 10 million is only about a decade away, vote or no vote. The real question isn’t whether Switzerland grows, but whether the trains, flats and schools can keep up. I guess only time will tell.

Eurostat just published its Demography of Europe – 2026 edition, an interactive report covering population trends across all 27 EU member states over several decades. It is worth checking out if you are interested in demographic data.

The headline is that the EU's 451 million people are growing slowly but ageing very fast. The share of people aged 65 and over has climbed from 17% to 22% in just two decades; the median age now sits at 44.9 years; and deaths have outnumbered births every year since 2012, with a fertility rate of just 1.34, well below the 2.1 needed to sustain a population.

What's keeping the numbers steady is immigration: nearly 6 million people arrived in 2024 alone. A quarter of children are now born to foreign-born mothers. The numbers make it pretty clear that Europe's demographic makeup is going to look quite different a generation from now.

The USA is indeed a country of immigrants. In 2013, 41M people out of a total population of 316M were foreign-born, coming from all over the world. The top countries of origin on that list are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, and Vietnam, but it's a true multinational and multicultural society that should be embraced!

Eurostat has an interesting dataset containing the crude marriage rate for the last decades across the EU. It's quite remarkable how, even if Portugal has one of the lowest rates in the EU, it used to be one of the highest in the 70s.

Eurostat has an interesting dataset showing the population change across Europe, including both natural change and the net migration contribution. The graph above shows how the rapid decline trend is slowly reversing, but migration is the main component of this change.

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1	China	1376790000
2	India	1289590000
3	United States	323661000
4	Indonesia	257900000
5	Brazil	206140000
6	Pakistan	193273000
7	Nigeria	187200000
8	Bangladesh	160479000
9	Russia	141800000
10	Japan	126700000

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The 10 most populous countries in the world. Almost 60% of the world population lives there.

The European Union statistical office has an interesting article about the impact of demographic ageing within the European Union (EU). One of the data tables shows the breakdown of the population for ages 0-14, 15-64, and over 65. The chart above shows this breakdown by country for the 0-14 and 65+ brackets. It's interesting how Ireland is the youngest country by far.

The European Union statistics office offers a dataset with the population density per country. The map above shows the latest data available, from 2014. It's not surprising that the Netherlands and Belgium have the highest density in continental Europe.