🇬🇷 Greece

Greece lost roughly 500,000 people net between 2008-2022, predominantly young and educated — the exact cohort needed to absorb AI transition. The 'improvement' in youth unemployment from 32% to 19.5% is not recovery; it's the denominator collapsing as the 25-34 cohort simply doesn't exist anymore. With a median age of 46.5, a fertility rate near 1.3, and old-age dependency at 37.4%, Greece is structurally a nursing home with a tourism brochure. The 'brain gain' rhetoric about returning diaspora is cope — they left because the economy offered nothing, and AI will accelerate this pattern as entry-level cognitive jobs (the ones returning Greeks would take) are exactly what gets automated first.

Greece has a National AI Strategy (2020, updated 2024) that reads like a TED talk translated into bureaucratic Greek — heavy on ethics, light on implementation. The 'Greece 2.0' recovery plan allocates around €6 billion to digital transformation, but absorption rates are glacial. No serious retraining infrastructure for the 400,000+ workers in tourism-adjacent services who will be displaced within a decade. Public sector unions ensure that any automation threatens to be politically suicidal.