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.)
The rise of fascism is always the result of a long strong of causes. In a democracy the final cause in that chain will always be voters, but I think it’s intellectually lazy to assume that makes the failure of voters “worse”.
Most of the voters who don’t show up are just disinterested in politics for a variety of reasons. I don’t think there area many that say “Oh, no, a problem! Better ignore it”!
Blaming voters might be somehow cathartic, but the voters you’re blaming aren’t going to care. That’s the way to go if you care more about assigning blame than actually addressing the problems.