Ahead of the European election, striking data shows where Gen Z and millennials’ allegiances lie.

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.)

    • Cowbee [he/him]English
      11•6 months ago

      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.

    • @Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6•6 months ago

      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.

      • @kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
        3•6 months ago

        So they market themselves as the just the strong man you need to deal with these problems

        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.