Ahead of the European election, striking data shows where Gen Z and millennials’ allegiances lie.
Far-right parties are surging across Europe — and young voters are buying in.
Many parties with anti-immigrant agendas are even seeing support from first-time young voters in the upcoming June 6-9 European Parliament election.
In Belgium, France, Portugal, Germany and Finland, younger voters are backing anti-immigration and anti-establishment parties in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters, analyses of recent elections and research of young people’s political preferences suggest.
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration far-right Freedom Party won the 2023 election on a campaign that tied affordable housing to restrictions on immigration — a focus that struck a chord with young voters. In Portugal, too, the far-right party Chega, which means “enough” in Portuguese, drew on young people’s frustration with the housing crisis, among other quality-of-life concerns.
The analysis also points to a split: While young women often reported support for the Greens and other left-leaning parties, anti-migration parties did particularly well among young men. (Though there are some exceptions. See France, below, for example.)
This is so frustrating to watch as an American. I spent much of my youth on the internet getting clowned on by Europeans for the consequences of my country’s hard right policies. The UK has been deservedly getting clowned on for the consequences of embracing the Tories. It beggars belief that the same people clowning on the US and UK would then turn around and say to themselves “yes, but it will be different for us, it will work for us, our situation really is different, you don’t understand”. No, it won’t be different. Pretty soon, you’re going to be following the path that the Tories set the UK on, marvelling at how dysfunctional your government is, and hearing about how the only solution is even more gibs to the people who are already the most economically advantaged and the private sector. Before you click reply, just consider that you guys deserve to get fucking dunked on, because you guys spent decades laughing at other countries for doing this shit just to say “hmmm… but what if sticking the fork in the electrical socket works out for me?” I’m honestly sad and disappointed for Europe, not least of all because after years of deservedly shitting on the US for being racist, all it took was one big wave of immigration for you guys to hold up blonde dumbasses with bad hair and worse ideas as the solution to all of your problems.
“Oh, great bozo of the European trailer park, what is your wisdom to save our culture from the immigrants?”
“Deregulate sewage plants. You will certainly not regret deregulating sewage plants.”
Enjoy your US-style healthcare system in a few years, I guess.
Europeans have a long history of blaming foreigners for their problems when times are tough. This isn’t really anything new.
Humanity has that long history.
Unfortunately, American politics is so toxic, its infected nearly every country its come into contact with.
Understanably, american money and election interference is the reason European politics is becoming more americanised. For example, it was regan who radicalised thatcher. It was American and Russian dark money that funded vote leave (brexit). It was the CIA who funded far right groups all over Europe. Its American, far right Christian groups who try to lobby to take away reproductive freedom for women etc. etc.
America is empire now and no ones laughing anymore.
Must suck living in a place with 450 million people none of which can think for themselves and instead are just vessels for the thoughts of other civilizations
Own up to your own crap if you want to fix it, or don’t own it and blame foreigners. See if I care.
Arguably the hard right foreign policies of the US from the last 10-20 years are responsible for a lot of the migrant waves Europeans are fearing. You guys blew up the middle east…
Yep. Dunno what else to say, we’re absolutely responsible.
This comment shows a large misunderstanding of european culture, policits, everything really. And I mean this with no offense, but there’s no nice way to say it.
The people who were - and still are - clowning on Americans for their politics are a different group than the people currently voting far right. You’re not dunking on the people you think you are. It’s tragically funny in a way because internet active and mostly left leaning circles still spend a lot of their time dunking on american politics while failing to see the growing trend of far right acceptance in Europe.
Europeans also aren’t a singular entity. The comparison of the US vs Europe is almost always bad IMO, as much as people of the internet love to make it - both americans and europeans alike - because the differences between two neighboring european countries are often larger than those between the two most culturally different US states. The country next over is so radically different to mine in terms of politics, economic choices, language, culture, that the only thing making us both “European” is a similar looking ID card and similar looking road signs. When I cross the border and order a coffee they look at me strange and then serve me what I would expect to get at an american coffee shop.
Europe is facing some of the same problems of the US politically speaking. Summing it up to “getting one big wave of immigration” is naive to say the least. There’s a growing discontent with traditional and more moderate parties, which have fundamentally failed to solve what many people see as big issues in their lives. There’s a housing crisis, an ever increasing wealth gap - which even left leaning socialist european parties, which were in power for decades in countries such as mine, have done next to nothing to prevent. There’s a perceived decrease in security - which is real in some places, while false in others but amplified by social media -, a bunch of high profile corruption cases all throughout Europe - often associated with high ranking members in more moderate parties. In short, there’s an ever increasing number of real issues which traditional parties have fundamentally failed to solve. Some because they’re genuinely complex issues, others because of sheer incompetence.
The media in Europe has spent the last few years treating far right parties the same way the media in the US initially treated Trump - painting them and their followers as crazy people which should be ridiculed and often pushing aside whatever issue they pushed as their political flag. The problem is that far right parties in Europe often pick very real problems as their political flags - such as corruption in the case of my country. They offer no actual solutions to the problems, of course, but the attitude of the media helps them paint the idea that the media and traditional parties are aligned in protecting corrupt individuals and that the only way to tackle the problem is to vote for extreme parties. Whatever the “main” political flag is varies from country to country, but the logic is always the same: Problem exists -> problem is pushed aside by media and traditional parties for whatever reason -> far right party picks up problem as their political flag even though they offer no solutions -> people vote for far right party after years of seeing problem be apparently ignored.
The last part on healthcare makes little sense as well. Public or partly public health services are culturally ingrained in a lot of European countries and many of the far right parties have been very outspoken about defending these services - not because they like their existence I’m sure, but because these healthcare systems are too popular to openly attack. A common attribute in a lot of European far right parties is that though they often claim to despise “the left” and make big claims about socialism having destroyed everything and etc, they’ll quickly incorporate any left leaning measure they perceive as popular - often defending measures which are so far left that you won’t even find them in the political plans of far left parties. Far right parties in Europe will incorporate anything they see as popular in their political plans - which they then use as a promotion point, arguing that they are “above” the left and right divide, instead focusing on whatever is “better for the country”.
Add to all of this a fundamental failure in left wing and moderate right wing parties to address many of these issues, even while being in power for decades in the came of some European countries, and the constant attempts by these same parties to silence anyone who so much as mentions hot topics like immigration - often by labeling them as racists, fascists, etc and what you get is a growing distrust in these parties.
The people who were - and still are - clowning on Americans for their politics are a different group than the people currently voting far right. You’re not dunking on the people you think you are.
But that’s sort of the point they were making, isn’t it? Left-leaning Europeans giving Americans across the spectrum shit for right-leaning politics even though the majority in all cases is slim and vulnerable to reversal?
Remember right before the last Italian election some Italian guy screaming at me how no one in the history of Europe was racist or right-wing. When I asked them afterwards about the election he said the CIA caused it.
Ok buddy. Italy has no history of fascism or racism. Nice to know.
I feel like a bad thing that happened to us started when, through science, we started finding more and more things that contradicted the bible, at the same time as some evangelical sects were pushing for a more and more literal interpretation of the bible, and so their only argument was that science is evil/blasphemous/whatever. So more and more people on the right got comfortable just disregarding scientists, facts, and information-driven conclusions. Instead, they just pick whatever narrative they’re comfortable with and even a lot of people who disagree with it treat it like a legitimate belief.
We used to call those people nutjobs. Now we call them Fox news viewers.
This part
It beggars belief that the same people clowning on the US and UK would then turn around and say to themselves “yes, but it will be different for us, it will work for us, our situation really is different, you don’t understand”.
and this one
Before you click reply, just consider that you guys deserve to get fucking dunked on, because you guys spent decades laughing at other countries for doing this shit just to say “hmmm… but what if sticking the fork in the electrical socket works out for me?”
both imply the people laughing at other countries are the same group willing to “stick the fork in the electrical socket”. They aren’t.
The right in the US really isn’t so different. The thing we know for sure is that fascists lie and lie often. The fascists here in the US aren’t above paying lip service to certain issues; Trump tried to convince the libertarian party to vote for him by letting the guy who ran Silk Road out of jail, for example. But they’d be fools to believe them, as Europeans are fools to believe their own dollar store Trumps when they say they’ll protect or embrace the social programs. Exhibit A: what the Tories have done to the NHS. The program really isn’t all that complex, they just sneak in some modest reforms that erode the service and enshittify it slowly, or do some bullshit temporary measure that puts the service permanent behind in terms of (one to all) money, employees, or output. Then, they use that as evidence for why they must further enshittify the service and give more taxpayer money to the private sector.
“as a European” is a sentence fragment I have read more than any other on the Internet.
I have a personal pet peeve with that. The expression “As a European” is almost always followed by something that’s entirely false or only concerns the commenter’s specific country or region. For some reason, people assume that things that are often specific to their country are “European”.
Just today I saw someone saying “us Europeans have to take a first aid course before getting a driver’s license”. WTF? I wish that was true. It’s certainly not true for my country. I’m not even sure that’s true for more than half of European countries. From a quick google search it seems that’s only a thing in maybe Germany, Austria, Hungary and Switzerland? There’s some twenty other European countries where that might not be a thing at all.
Like I said, even internet Europeans have the weird habit of assuming things specific to their country are some shared European value, when it’s almost always not the case.
It’s all about immigration and housing.
I’m pretty fair left. It’s weird that traditionally left leaning parties were about housing as jobs. But they seem to have lost their way.
The more you care about certain things the more you have to vote right because the left got their head in the sans.
I don’t know what deregulation of sewage plants would even look like. Do you mean I’m how they are built or their design or their day to day operations or how many of the workers at them are private vs public?
IIRC, one of the effects of Brexit is that the UK’s sewage outlets to the ocean were no longer bound by EU regulations, which led to extremely high sewage contamination and closing of a number of English (specifically English, I want to say) beaches.
I would always point out that European security has been subsidized by the American taxpayer for 70 years. Finally starting to see that change, I just hope idiots like Geert aren’t the ones leading that charge.
American hegemony was a conscious American policy choice. We didn’t want the Euros having an independent foreign policy, we wanted them reliant on American military protection. This was how the US kept those bits of its empire in line.
Notice how the only Western European country that even pays lip service to independent action is France, the one Western European country with a military capable of independent operation. And then we get “Freedom Fries” and all that shit whenever they don’t do whatever the current US admin wants.
The single biggest thing Trump fucked up for the US was pushing NATO countries to spend more on defence. This will drastically reduce US influence over the continent in the coming decades, speeding up America’s worsening diplomatic isolation.
Freedom fries = that thing that was a week long 21 years ago.
If it were a person it could legally drink…but you are welcome to bring it up again for another 21 years as some sorta attempt a a deep conversation killer.
I think that’s a bad take. Here’s the thing, “freedom fries” wasn’t a self-enclosed phenomenon. It was part of a broader jingoistic fever that swept through the US post-9/11. Yeah, sure, it’s fair to joke about Americans being dumb, but our brains dead ass shut off after 9/11, and anyone could do anything if they just waved their hands and said “terrorists, 9/11”. And Operation Iraqi freedom was just one of the turd sandwiches we ferociously gobbled down under such framing. Freedom fries happened because France wouldn’t support our stupid, pointless invasion, and the boomer email network kicked into overdrive to create a new meme (in the literal sense of the word) of replacing anything having to do with the treacherous French with Freedom. And that was what we did to people who owed us nothing, so it felt much more dangerous to step out against it as an American, at least in the early days of the war.
Never found any of it funny. You go ahead and make your “jokes” for another 21 years. Maybe someone will laugh at them.
Oh and btw I went to the Iraq protests. Maybe you were afraid but I wasn’t. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel like making “jokes” to feel tough now.
Not my jokes, and I don’t think it’s funny. You might want to re-read my post, I certainly wasn’t celebrating the attitude that spawned freedom fries.
Was your jokes.
I’d prefer a multipolar world provided the other poles are actual democracies. Europe should step up and have a bigger say
I mean, not trying to sound like a pessimist as much as a realist. Even if Europe started paying the full sum of what we’re paying in defense subsidies, I seriously doubt we’d cut that spending. Raytheon and Lockheed’s investors are counting on us.
That’s not actually all that surprising. The far-right, at least in Germany, is far more prominent on social media. It sucks but I don’t think we can prevent that. We have a lot of complex problems but social media favors short answers instead of complex ones. A lot of younger people simply lack the critical thinking to see these simple answers for what they are - bullshit. And I can’t blame them, they have been exposed to this bullshit for most of their lives.
I don’t know how it is in Germany, though I am convinced our methods in the U.S to educate and school kids and teens actively hurt critical thinking skills. They’re not taught to make decisions. They’re taught to follow set rules, ask for permission, and be ashamed if they fail. They’re not taught to learn, they’re taught to work.
They’re taught to follow set rules, ask for permission, and be ashamed if they fail. They’re not taught to learn, they’re taught to work.
This might be even more ingrained in German culture.
That’s a feature, not a bug. The far right has been attacking our educational system since Reagan, if not before.
They can’t exist with a well educated populace.
I was coming in here to suggest this. The right around the world, almost certainly with the aid of Russia’s massive troll farm, has really stepped up its game in terms of internet outreach to young people.
I do agree that social media is a huge driver of our societal problems and not fixing them, but I think you have the order reversed, social media is extremely effective at transmitting short, easy answers to our problems because that’s what people gravitate to on the whole. Especially extremely scared and desperate people, and young people especially see a lot of reasons to be afraid about what the future is going to look like.
We haven’t even really gotten to ecoFascism yet, but I think it’s inevitable to rise as things continue marching forward without dramatic societal changes
We aren’t getting to eco fascism because pollution populism is all the rage. After all, if Taylor Swift can fly around the world easily, why can’t I drive around in my emotional support truck?
It’s amazing that it needs to be said, but Boomer politics won’t die with boomers. We’ll still have the same problems, but people will be more desperate as we will have fewer solutions and resources to throw at them than previous generations
Also worth pointing out that only a slight majority of boomers are very conservative. If you look at the demographics of the last couple presidential elections, you’ll see that only slightly more boomers voted conservative than liberal, and only slightly more younger folks voted liberal than conservative.
There’s this impression that the distinction is much more significant than it actually is. As a liberal boomer, I’m a little sensitive about it.
I dont know about the US but in the UK the age gap is vast. Something like 80% of 75+ vote tory or extreme right and a similar % of under 30 for lib/lab/green
If that’s correct, that’s a much more significant difference than in the US.
Does Europe have the same kind of post war baby boom generation that the US has?
A lot of people vote far-right out of despair. A “things are shit and can’t get any worse” mentality.
The best defence against the right is government that actually works for the people.
Which is why the right work so hard to assure Gov. does not work.
And why they dismantle the systems they’re tasked with protecting the moment they can.
This is exactly, literally true. The hard right folks in all branches of government are always throwing wrenches in the machine and then complaining that we have to get rid of the machine because it doesn’t work.
Look! We gutted the public system. Clearly the privatized alternative must be the solution. We support privatization btw, so you need to vote for us!
Yep. This hardship has been coming at us for over 100years and, given the choice, most people will choose to have some faceless ‘other’ bear the problem than to share the hardship with the rest of the world. The climate crisis is real and this is just the tip of the mass migrations that will want to occur. If we don’t let them in, soon they will stop asking permission.
Perhaps, with enough propaganda, we could get them so turned back on themselves and they will be too weak to attack us before they realize their true enemy. Western-style politics has proven it a potentially viable strategy.
The right-wing promises you may be burdened, but others will be more burdened to make you feel like you are not the bottom. The left doesn’t understand, or is unwilling to accept, the emotional deficiency of people like the right.
Prominent gender gaps in the results, which is entirely unsurprising (men much more likely to vote far right than women). I think the left-right breakdown could be more explicit too, as in many cases the left wing votes are being split between a bunch of parties, with the right wing settling on only one or two. That’s still in an issue in countries that use FPTP voting systems, of course.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration far-right Freedom Party won the 2023 election on a campaign that tied affordable housing to restrictions on immigration — a focus that struck a chord with young voters.
In Portugal, too, the far-right party Chega, which means “enough” in Portuguese, drew on young people’s frustration with the housing crisis, among other quality-of-life concerns.
In 2022, while Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy received votes from every age bracket, data suggested the young favored left-wing parties more.
Bardella’s strong presence on TikTok might have something to do with it: Pollsters found that about one-third of young people said they rely on the app to follow the election campaign.
The survey results also don’t automatically translate into electoral success, as the researchers estimated just 30 percent of young people would end up casting a ballot.
“Flemish Interest is very well aware of this, and explicitly targets young women in its campaign to adjust its image,” said Peter Van Aelst, a professor at the University of Antwerp.
The original article contains 960 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
some younger people like me are not allowed to vote because of bipartisan policies and laws
quit blaming us for everybody refusing to vote better people in
not our fault y’all refuse to vote better
It sounds like you’re an American citizen. As such you’re really not very relevant in the European election…
That sounds pretty shit. I’m pretty ignorant of EU voting laws, what kind of laws prevent young folks from voting? Is it a high voting age or are there even more restrictions?
Being 12 years old
This is the result of the left focusing so hard on identity politics and immigration. The right didn’t have to do shit… it was inevitable.
Identity politics surely is to blame for the rise of fascism. Just like the last time in the years 1915-1945.
You are almost quoting the fascist playbook line of “look what you made me do”.
I’m right, but you don’t have to like it, I’m okay with that.
In Europe…
Yes, as the blurb says in the fourth word or so.
Edit: did the math and counted up to the fourth word
What you just did is the equivalent to replying all to a mass email chain telling people to stop replying all
Why are you “all”? Lol
You’re the only one who got the notification
Weird you can comment on this chain without seeing it…
You must be fun at parties
