The claim that marriages are in “durable decline” across the European Union needs careful framing. Recent official releases do support two points at once: the pandemic created an exceptional trough, and the subsequent recovery has not restored marriage to the levels seen in earlier decades.
Eurostat’s March 2026 update of its “Marriage and divorce” article estimates about 1.7 million marriages in the EU in 2024, equivalent to a crude marriage rate of 3.9 per 1,000 people. This is higher than the pandemic low in 2020 (3.2) and close to 2021 (3.9), but still below the pre-Covid level reported for 2019 (4.3). Over the longer run, Eurostat describes a halving in the EU crude marriage rate since the mid-1960s and highlights intermediate peaks, including 2007 (5.0) and 2018 (4.5), before the sharp fall in 2020. In other words, the rebound since Covid-19 is real, yet the underlying direction remains downward when viewed over decades rather than years.
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Country patterns underline why an EU-wide “recovery” can coexist with continued weakness relative to the early 2010s. The Eurostat summary for 2024 shows substantial variation: Latvia (5.5 marriages per 1,000 people), Romania (5.3) and Austria (5.0) were among the highest, while Italy (2.9), Slovenia (3.0) and Bulgaria (3.2) were among the lowest.
In France, the national statistical office Insee republishes Eurostat indicators for EU comparisons and reports a crude marriage rate of 3.5 per 1,000 inhabitants in 2023, compared with 4.0 for the EU-27 as a whole (Eurostat extraction dated 12 March 2026). Insee’s own demographic publications also emphasise the importance of separating short-term cyclical effects (the Covid-19 disruption and subsequent catch-up) from longer-term shifts in partnership formation, such as later family transitions and the wider use of legal alternatives to marriage. These structural factors help explain why marriage totals can rise after a shock without returning to an earlier baseline.
The original statement also links later unions to “short divorces” in parts of Western Europe. The “later unions” component aligns with Eurostat’s broader demographic narrative: marriage has become less universal and typically occurs later than it once did, even if age-specific details vary by country and depend on the measure used (first marriage versus all marriages). The “short divorces” element is more difficult to substantiate with a single EU-wide indicator, because divorce statistics can be presented either as crude divorce rates (divorces per 1,000 people) or as measures linked to marriage cohorts and marriage duration.