The issue of the incorrect registration of citizens aged 100 and over was raised in an article by the “Financial Times” last Friday (19/4), where a reference is even made to Greece, and in particular to the gaps that emerged in 2011 among the centenarians citizens and those who received a pension and declared their age to be over 100 years old.
At the time, about 9,000 pensioners in large insurance funds appeared to be over 100, while the 2011 census put centenarians at no more than 2,500. Ten years ago, during the 2001 census, they did not exceed 1,500.
For this reason, the Ministry of Labor had then introduced a package of measures to clarify the real number of old-age pensioners. From this effort, it appeared that the number of pensioners who had received from… the grave was not at all negligible. In January 2023, however, pensioners aged 96 and over amounted to 26,324, while according to ELSTAT citizens aged 95 and over reached a total of 27,538. This small difference shows that the problem in the pension funds has largely – if not completely – been solved. Even if they still exist, deceased pensioners are now few and far between. Besides, the irregularities in the Pension System concern more those who are entitled to a pension but do not receive it, and not those who receive it without being entitled to it.
However, if the issue of fictitious pensions was largely clarified during the period of the memoranda, when stories of the Greek State’s madness came to light, the incorrect registration of elderly citizens continues to a large extent, as was seen in last year’s polls, as well as in the electoral rolls there were approximately 179,000 registered voters over the age of 100, according to (now dismissed for Anna-Michel Asimakopoulou’s e-mails) Secretary General of the Ministry of the Interior Michalis Stavrianoudakis.
In fact, of these, 65,000 were over 110 years old and 10,000 over… 115. With Article 30 of Law 5083/2024 which introduced postal voting, the government is attempting to put order to this particular “hole” in the electoral rolls. According to the provision of the law, those who were born before 1/1/1944 (i.e. 80 years and older), do not have a valid Greek passport, do not receive a pension and have not submitted the themselves or do not appear as dependents in tax returns for 2022 that have been submitted by the end of 2023. According to the statements of Deputy Minister of the Interior Theodoris Livanios, it is estimated that approximately 500,000-600,000 registered in the electoral rolls have died and will be deleted. However, these deletions will take place in October, so in the European elections in June we can expect to see “miracles” of longevity in the country again.
And so the question arises: How many are, in the end, really our centenarian and supercentenarian fellow citizens? According to ELSTAT’s estimates for the country’s population, on January 1, 2023, citizens over 100 years old are estimated at 3,105 in total. Of these, the vast majority (2,242 or 72%) are women, while the rest (863 or 28%) are men. Women, moreover, outnumber men in all five-year age groups over 45, and slightly outnumber men in the population as a whole.
Of our centenarian fellow citizens, one in three is in Attica (1,047), 289 are in Central Macedonia, 275 in Crete, 274 in Western Greece, 264 in the Peloponnese and 204 in Epirus. However, the number of citizens aged 100 and over appears to have been corrected since the 2021 census, as centenarians were estimated at 6,616 in 2016, 7,100 in 2017, 8,271 in 2018, 9,332 in 2019 and 12,137 in 2020.
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