If you have less and older workers there is only so much you can do to keep an economy running. Thankfully all the fascist are against having younger working age people come to Europe. God forbid the economy to stay afloat.
My point exactly from a post a few months ago. You have to choose from more immigration, lower living standards, reduced public services or higher taxes.
Why are our politicians so bad at explaining this?
There also was a pretty large energy crisis in the EU, whereas the US profits from exporting oil and gas. Add to that Germany paying down debt in an economic crisis, which obviously slows down the rest of EU as well. Obviously falling population shrinks the economy as well and that is happening in half of the EUs most populous countries namely Italy, Poland, Romania, Czechia and Portugal. Spain is fairly likely to join them too with nearly no population growth. Clearly GDP per capita is the more important metric, but still.
The solution is clearly to transform the economy faster towards becoming green. That solves the energy problem and cuts useless imports of fossil fuels, which make up over 20% of EU imports.