THE KIDS ARE FAR RIGHT

 

 

 The writing was on the wall—or, at least, in the polls. Despite the fact that young Europeans turned out en masse to prevent a predicted far-right surge during the 2019 European Parliament elections, they wouldn’t be compelled to do so again five years later. If anything, analysts warned, many would end up voting for the far right.

And vote they did. While the June European Parliament elections ended in victory for Europe’s center-right parties, the radical right made historic gains—enough to throw the bloc’s biggest powers off-balance. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally emerged victorious in the elections with more than 30% of the vote—an electoral blow so devastating that French President Emmanuel Macron called a snap legislative election expected to conclude on July 7. In Germany, the extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) finished second only to the opposition center-right Christian Democrats, trouncing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and their coalition partners, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats, and throwing the government’s stability into doubt.

Young people played their part. Among French voters under 34, the National Rally was the most popular party, securing 32% of their votes. Though the AfD wasn’t the most popular party among young Germans, it tripled its support among 16-to-24-year-olds from 5% in 2019 to 16% today. Germany lowered its legal voting age to 16 from 18 ahead of the European elections.

Such an outcome would have been unthinkable just five years ago, when young Europeans were thought to be more likely to throw a milkshake at a far-right politician than vote for one. While this shift to the far right can be explained by a number of factors—not least the cost-of-living and housing crises that have hit Europe’s Gen Z and younger millennials particularly hard—many observers credit the far right’s social media prowess for their success. Jordan Bardella, the National Rally’s 28-year-old president and presumed successor to Le Pen, boasts 1.6 million followers on TikTok, a platform he has used to communicate with young voters directly. In Germany, “the AfD has more reach than all the other parties combined,” says Laura-Kristine Krause, the executive director of the More in Common think tank in Berlin.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to France and Germany. Across Europe, far-right parties have been able to strike a chord with young voters—not only by appealing to them on their favorite social media platforms, but by tying the issues young people care about—like a lack of affordable housing—with their own signature policies: namely, restricting immigration. This was evident during last year’s Dutch elections, in which the far-right firebrand Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration Freedom Party won the largest share of votes, including 17% of voters ages 18 to 34 (up from 7% in the previous election). Far-right parties have made similar inroads with young voters in Portugal, Spain, and Finland.

THESE TRENDS PRESENT a stark shift from just five years ago, when the received wisdom was that younger generations were more politically progressive and environmentally minded than those that came before them. The reality is that younger people “are way more open in all directions,” says German political scientist Thorsten Faas. Indeed, the second most popular party among young French voters was Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftist France Unbowed. Young German voters were split across various parties, largely the AfD, the Christian Democrats, and the Greens.

“There was this perception that young people are progressive, and they’re not,” Krause says. But she notes that those backing the far right aren’t necessarily doing so for purely ideological reasons. Rather, she says, young people tend to be overrepresented among what she dubs the “Invisible Third,” a segment of society that isn’t as socially or politically integrated, and thus more susceptible to far-right talking points. “They don’t feel like they’re being talked to by politicians; like they don’t have a seat at the table,” she adds.

None of this is to say that young voters represent a burgeoning far-right generation. “Youth support for the far-right parties likely stems from the same factors driving many of their peers to the left: frustrations with political establishments and policies seen as ill-equipped to address the structural causes of big issues,” says Lucas Robinson of the Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs. The institute’s recent study found that global challenges such as pandemics and climate change are considered to be the biggest threats among young adults (ages 18 to 29) in France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S.; political elites making decisions that hurt the public was deemed the second biggest, whereas immigration came in third. If there are any lessons more moderate political parties can take from the European elections, it’s that they can no longer presuppose their support. “Gen Z and millennials are not monoliths,” Robinson says. “These election results showed that their views cannot be taken for granted.”

TIME