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.)
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.