The social/financial/political/ecological issue that has gotten worse over a long period of time. It’s in the back of every citizen’s mind. It’s not pressing at the moment, but everyone knows it’ll explode eventually. Nearly everyone in the world could say climate change or national debt, but what’s unique to your country?
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Everybody is getting old and no one has kids so one day our retirement system is going to collapse. The question is when?
Probably something to do with Brexit, because pretty much everything is at this point that isn’t related to Covid.
For the longest time, the interest on your mortgage was tax deductible, even on really big and expensive houses bought by wealthy folks who really didn’t need this tax deduction. This cost the government a lot of money, but conservative parties kept this arrangement unchanged until it became too expensive. Under pressure from left-leaning parties this tax deduction is now slowly being fased out over a longer period of time. This might not have been necessary if it had only been for lower income people only in the first place. So it’s been adressed, but probably not quickly enough. People looking to buy a house really benefit from it, especially now that housing prices have skyrocketed.
Not unique to Iceland but we have a very large minority from a single country that is like a society within our society.
Pretty much half of our country will be under water in a century
Climate change, especially for a country like the Netherlands. Yes, we pride ourselves in our water management, but it will be extremely hard to keep the water out when the sea level rises 2meters or more. What’s even harder is that climate change will cause more droughts and heavier sudden rainfalls and floodings of rivers at the same time. In the last centuries the Netherlands have always focused on keeping water out, but now we have to organise our land to keep water in and to be able to get rid of excess water at the same time.
With about 1/3 of the country being below sea level, we have to control the ground water, and we’ve been doing that for centuries already with pumps, but it’s getting harder and harder. If it’s too low, salt water will flow from the sea into the rivers, making land infertile, so we cannot grow anything anymore. If it’s too high, we keep the salt water out, but the lowest parts will be underwater or too wet and when there’s heavy rainfall the land will flood more easily.
With higher sea levels we need a higher ground water level. There’s basically no other option.
The economy is already starting to crumble. Prices have skyrocketed, gas and energy have pretty much doubled in the past few years. Inflation is at 7.8%, and it’s not dipping anytime soon. Housing prices are getting out of hand, too. Everyday life is becoming noticeably more expensive every year, and salaries are stagnant.
Climate. Polish approach towards coal mines and coal power plants is “if I don’t see it it doesn’t exist”. Meanwhile people living in coal mining regions know the days of the industry are counted.
Population as well. There’s no meaningful pro family policy. We have “you gave birth to a baby, here’s 500 PLN each month”, but it’s not really working. I mean it is (there’s less poverty) but not in there being more babies. Jobs are not paying enough for one member of the family to support their whole family on their wage alone, housing is really expensive and many don’t have a stable job – things actually needed for people to start families. Three government seams not to care, instead we have abortion ban and rumors about contraceptive bans and making it harder to divorce, so the policies that do the opposite of being pro family
I’d say the elderly wave. People born before 1963 can still expect a good pension (provided they worked during their productive years). People born after that will get less pensions, will have to work longer for their own pension. At the same time, the ratio of working people to seniors is going to drop, potentially impacting productivity, taxes, public spending, need for elder nurses instead of teachers, etc
Outside the usual issues (especially the ageing population) Finland’s exports have been proportionally rather dependent on the forestry industry. It is approximately 18% of our exports while contributing heavily to the side flows of other large industries (notably chemicals).
This makes the Finnish forests, which are very large on a European scale, very prone to the impacts of climate change. The issue is heavily undermined by the debate about the carbon impact of the forests in the first place, which has left the risks into a much smaller conversation.
There are a couple of key risks, many of which will escalate due to climate change. Firstly, forest fires have been more common and larger due to extremely hot summers, especially up north. Secondly, these dry periods and lack of snow in the winters can also otherwise impact the health of the forests. Thirdly, there’s also a large number of pests and foreign species that may be introduced to the Finnish ecosystems, which may damage the forests.
Currently, the issue is mostly discussed from insurance perspectives, but depending on its seriousness and scale, we might be talking about a ticking nuclear weapon in terms of one of the largest industry sectors in Finland. This is also troubling for the whole supply chain, as most of the Finnish forests are actually owned by individuals, hence contributing to the general wealth of the population.
Our government has reached the point where, to preserve their current kleptocracy, they need to descend deeper and deeper into authoritarianism and absurdity. The political field is a nuclear wasteland and many things slowly fall apart. It will either blow up, or we will turn into a North Korea-like isolationist police state.
The whole country tbh… the corruption, the international politics (especially towards the EU), the growing tension between the opposition and the government (both between the parties and the voters)
But the worst of them all, our next election. It’s going to be next spring, and nothing good will come from it; whatever happens, I wouldn’t leave my car outside in the inner city of Budapest.
For Ireland, while serious issues are being discussed like housing shortage, healthcare with Sláintecare, transport although that’s is often kicked in the long grass and the unique situation with the North.
One thing that’s not discussed is the current economic regime, with the tax haven status for companies with low corporation tax and large government subsidies for multinationals. Considering, the governments internationally are cracking down on tax evasion, the treasury is going to have real trouble finding funds in the future.
I speak for most of the balkans here. But specially, Bulgaria and Albania. Their population has been dropping significantly for a long time now. It is a combination of low birth rate and massive emigration. The other balkan countries are like a decade or two behind, but the same fate awaits us.
With exceptions, like Slovenia, Greece or Croatia. They also get some people immigrating to their country and their life standards are comparatively pretty good. There is also Kosovo, which still has rather high birth rate, but it will come to them eventually as well.
Might be Flanders vs Wallonia.You see nationalist parties getting bigger.
At the moment we are in the biggest demograhic hole. The wave from WW2 is overlapped by extremely low fertility of 90s and current petty economic situation. We are close to the moment when there will be not enough people to fill vacancies. Government tries to do something, but more often than not it’s just demagoguery targeted at the most loyal auditory (50+).
Few years ago Russians have started to pay more for waste processing, and there were some big promises about modern facilities to replace old style landfills. But nothing have changed. Maybe because the people in charge are closely tied to some top-tier government officials. Landfills are overflowed and everything looks like no one have any idea what to do with it.
Politics. Right now it’s not obvious, but we’ll face either a power vacuum and a chaos in future or some kind of true totalitarian state.
Every politician’s lazy solution to every issue is to spend more of our accumulated wealth. The oil platforms are polluting? Lay an enormous electric cable on the sea bed so they can use electricity from the mainland instead of burning their own gas. Artists are struggling? Just make the whole art scene government-funded. People are freezing because Germany’s ill-advised decision to phase out nuclear is driving the electricity prices up? No worries, the government is taking the bill!
Some day soon, the oil income will be gone, and we’ll be out of solutions.
Power supply.
Our nuclear reactors are already working past their retirement date, so keeping them open is not an option. They will close down in 2025. On top of that we are no where near a reliable renewable power supply. Our power grid is still HEAVILY reliant on nuclear.
Because of the green faction anti-nuclear fearmongering no thought was given into building new reactors to bridge the gap untill we might rely on clean alternatives/reneweables, and if we were to consider building nuclear reactors now, it might takes decades to get them in working order. (Plan for closing down was put in effect in 2003, with subsequent alterations in the later decades for extentions, if we decided on building new reactors then we might not have been in trouble now)
So we are in a situation were they are opening new fossil fuel reactors. Making us more dependant on foreign suppliers (both for power, and for fossil fuel supply). But even so we can expect problems in our power supply or high prices in the coming decades…
I would say our state pension. Don’t know if it is the right word.
Everybody knows that we will have not the money in the near future to fund it if we don’t do anything but yet we vote everytime no when a reform comes up.
Unique to Germany… at this point we have a firmly cemented alt right consisting of disappointed former GDR citizens, antivaxxers, people that think Germany is not a legitimate country (“Reichsbürger”), xenophobists, neonazis, esoterics, conspiracy theorists….
it’s a Venn diagram of hell and these people are harder and harder to reach. Just yesterday there was a huge police raid in Dresden after some people on Telegram plotted killing a head of state.
Germany is full of unexploded ww2 bombs, that get more unstable by the day.
In 2013, it was estimated that there are still 100,000 duds in the ground all over Germany, of which 5,500 are removed every year, although the operation slows down the rarer they get.
I have started to type a comment and deleted it again like four times, because I don’t even know where to fucking start.
The problem that other countries have, and we do not, is probably ageing population (Turkish people still largely are very family friendly, and having two kids is very common). Other than that, our economy has gone sideways ages ago, unemployment is off the scale, we do exactly nothing for the climate & environment, and people are basically just trying to float.
There aren’t enough workers. Unemployment has been very low for a long time and companies are fighting among themselves for employees.
That raises wages, which is good, but it also necessarily raises prices and inflation.
It will not be easy to solve this with immigration, because Czechs don’t want immigrants, and another problem is the language issue – Czech is a difficult language and in many fields employees simply have to be able to speak it.
The railways. The UK has the oldest railway network in the world yet comparatively little has been done to keep the network up-to-date. And now while there is a bit of fiddling around the amount of work that needs to be done is massive, all in a society where people are increasingly preferring to forego the car and prefer public transport, especially in places like London and the South.
Education.
For years the overall quality of education has been dropping, and everybody’s content with passing the ball further down the line to the next government.
Apart from some exceptions, our universities have been steadily dropping in university ranking statistics, and our students have been placing lower in the different youth olympiads, e.g. the International Mathematics Olympiad.
To give an example of why this might be happening, for years you had to get at least a grade of 4 (on a scale of 1-to-10) on your state exams, in order to finish your secondary education.
Some 15 or so years ago, it was changed to a percentage system, based on how much of the exam you got right. The kicker here is that at the same time they also changed the passing grade from a 4 or 40% to **5%**! To put this into perspective, you’d need to circle only 4 correct answers in a 15 question multiple choice test, which composes the first, and easiest, part of the 3 part Centralized Mathematics exam.
[Edit: These are the first 4 questions, which, if answered correctly, bring get you a passing grade](https://imgur.com/a/FgmGzX9).
For the first couple of years it was obfuscated by officially grading the exam results from A to F, which was additionally confusing, because each subject had it’s own grading range, e.g. to get a C in “English” you had to complete at least 52% – 67% of the exam, while a C in “History” required you to get 41% – 58% correctly, but they dropped it afterwards.
Either way, this has resulted in statistics that show a very high rate of secondary education graduates, at the same time graduating a bunch of uneducated kids that are not ready to either start tertiary education, nor enter the labor market.
So many ticking bombs I don’t know where to start.
Integration? Receiving refugees/immigrants is fine and all, but there are so many problems the government weren’t prepared for and apparently are at a loss how to solve.
Education? Private schools funded with taxes just like public schools but allowed to make profits? Great idea… Not enough certified teachers in the schools either and the public schools suffer even more.
Healthcare? Not enough doctors outside of bigger cities and shutting down hospitals in more rural areas so pregnant women have to travel 100s of miles to give birth. No wonder there are “too many men” left behind in those areas. Expensive “relay” nurses and doctors filling vacant positions but there’s never enough money while a new hospital can go millions over budget and people are waiting months for surgery. Or they get misdiagnosed or overlooked so they die needlessly.
Climate? I’m sure our forests are at risk and now the winter came early so water is running low. Forest fires in drier summers.
I probably forgot something.
Eta: privatizing healthcare to focus on monetary profits leading to cutting costs, understaffing and elderly people dying in droves when unexpected events, like…say…a global pandemic, occur.
Well, someone decided to build our capital in a place [susceptible to massive earthquakes every 300 years or so](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake). And it’s almost been 300 years after the last one.
Corruption is rampant. And it’s not just in a way that they are stealing money. They’ve put uneducated people close to the ruling part on important jobs running the electricity grid and similar. They’ve employed every person who voted for them in those big state companies with the good salary. We have lots of incompetent people running the show while everything around them is going to hell. Our energy grid is collapsing and people in charge don’t know what to do.
We rely on coal plants that are decades old and are in dire need of reconstruction.
The slide into the authoritarianism is also happening before our eyes and the opposition is incompetent to do anything about it except fight among themselves and feed their egos.
Ageing population is one of the bigger problems. There are not enough people in the workforce to support the pension system.
Brain drain is the one of the bigger ones also. Everybody who knew something or had some skills was able to leave has left or is in the proces of doing so leaving behind the country of old people who trust every headline in the news.
But the most pressing one is the destruction of the environment. And it will explode in the face of the rullign party. Even two years ago nobody was expecting that. Now there are people who are ready to sabotage the machines to protect the rivers and the air from beeing polluted by dirty industries.
The retirement issue is prevalent in most Western countries, and the new government is pursuing decent strategies to fix it.
A way more pressing issue is the looming *nursing crisis*. Neoliberal reforms (because of course) for hospitals incentivized them to reduce the number of nursing personal, who are already criminally underpaid, overworked and with many looking for new careers.
Add to that Covid and the nursing sector is expected to miss up to half a million people in the next few years.
Besides a struggling economy and the brain drain caused by this and young people being priced out of their communities, Wales has a lot of high risk coal tips. Due to our extensive industrial past, thousands of coal tips were dumped on the mountains with little regard for safety. These weren’t a concern, However, until October 1966. Despite the locals of Aberfan warning the authorities for months of slippage, nothing was done about the coal tip above their town. The unimaginable happened when it collapsed, destroying houses and smothering a school, killing 116 children.
Ever since, these coal tips have been an existential threat to the towns living in their shadow.
Recently, a lot have shown signs of slipping and being unstable. A government report earlier this year identified 2456 tips, 327 of which were high risk. What worries a lot of people is that it looks like nothing may even be done about this, because the cost to stabilise them is estimated at £600 million, but the Welsh and UK govts have been fighting over who should pay. The Welsh govt would struggle to fund this alone and argues the UK should help a little as these coal tips were made decades before the Welsh govt existed, while the UK govt believes it’s not their problem.
If nothing is done to stabilise these coal tips, it’s only a matter of time until another one collapses and buries a town. Who knows what the death toll would be this time.
How to phase out the oil sector
To say that it’s a cornerstone of our economy would be an understatement, and it has made us one of the wealthiest countries on earth. But, it seems to just be a matter of time until the oil drilling will end, and the question then is what to replace it with
The debt we have towards China in order to build a highway through a very mountainous region in the north. The debt is piling up, the crisis in the world almost hit a fan and we didn’t even finish the highway yet.
I would say currency crisis/economy, but that bomb has already exploded.
**Unemployment**
Almost all countries have unemployment but Honestly Spain plays on another league among the developed countries. We’re talking **over 15%**
The ticking bomb though comes from how It’s distributed. Youth unemployment IS at 40% and we honestly don’t know how the heck to solve It.
Spain has historically had high unemployment. It’s what economists like to call chronic unemployment. There’s a substantial black economy and a general lack of industry.
(Btw this is related to another ticking time bomb that just exploded, **”our overdependance on international trade and tourism”**)
The price of electricity.
Also since the covid crisis, all of the Catalonia political drama has calmed down but I believe it will come back at any moment unexpectedly.
And people getting older while youngsters don’t have a job, that is messing with out public funds so much.
Netherlands:
Rising levels of contaminated water in the coal mines that closed in the 1970s. Every year the water levels creeps closer to ground water level and eventually it will surface. Polluting the soil and surface waters in ways not seen before.
No one is talking about this. When this becomes a politicised issue in a decade, possibly two, you read it here first.
The issue of the monarchy. More and more people are against it and if it’s removed it’s very likely the many separatist groups could try and obtain independence. If the republicans get as they want the nation will probably fall apart. If the monarchy stays maybe it’ll stay United but there is a chance it could still fall apart.
Also the general large amounts of cultural revival movements making a common Spanish identity confusing and there is less friendship between us. Even people in the same culture or ethnic groups are forming regional identities. Maybe becoming more federal will help but it could also be our death blow, who knows.
General economic stagnation and migrant situation as well but that’s standard in Europe.