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.)
When people find themselves in stress, they will always vote conservative to ensure their own survival. Right now, many young people can’t afford housing, they have to spend more time working than living. This is not surprising.
Which makes no fucking sense since conservatives just make those issues worse.
Reactionary viewpoints are a result of crumbling and decaying societies. They cling to what once was, rather than trying to progress onward to Socialism.
Reactionaries are wrong, of course, but the origin of these viewpoints currently is from Capitalism’s failures.
It makes all the sense in the world. Horrible people want to be in power. So they market themselves as the just the strong man you need to deal with these problems. No problems? well then they just create them. There isn’t anything stopping them from just lying about where the problems came from, so it turns into a self licking ice cream cone.
Without ever specifying how they’re planning on fixing those problems.
And more often than not, the problems they claim to be able to deal with were not anything people were thinking about until that same candidate told them they should be concerned about it.
Yup
That isn’t a safe bet, though.
The cornerstone of the conservative M-O is withdrawal of services and opportunities for the 99%. Sure, this sticks it to immigrants, but only because it shafts everyone but the rich.
And when those services go away - healthcare, unemployment protection, programmes sponsoring training so people can get back to paying tax sooner - they never come back under this administration. It’s left as the sole focus of the fools who follow them and have to stoch a country back together out of the unmaintained underpowered mess of a system the elitist scum left them with.
Of course it’s not a safe bet, that’s why it’s based in fear. That’s how it’s always been.
What the elites didn’t sell to themselves for a song at any rate. That’s the other part of it, they raid the government for parts and then turn it into a profit service no matter how many people they end up killing.