Europe’s Rightwing Youthshift

Are the kids here to save us?

This is the latest installment in my “deep dive” series, in which I, with the help of an anonymous academic, dig into election data to get at what is really going on. It might be a bit detailed for the likes of some readers – if so, don’t hesitate to skip the first section!

Last week I commented on the shift to the right across the continent in the EU elections on June 6–9^th and in particular to the populist right. The combined vote for parties such as the National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany, and the Brothers of Italy – now dubbed “hard right” by the media, mysteriously downgraded from “far right” previously – secured them a full quarter of the seats in the European parliament, putting their two main groupings on 141 MEPs to the center-right European People’s Party’s 189. Overall, such populist nationalist parties came in first or second place in 10 out of 27 EU member states, their best-ever result, including in the Big Three countries of France, Germany and Italy.

In today’s post I want to focus on another significant aspect of the results: namely, how the surge to right was driven by the youth vote, especially young men. How big was this shift, what drove it, and what is its broader significance? Read on to find out!

What Happened – In Detail

The headline is this: Young people in Europe are shifting away from the left in droves. Not to the pointless center-right long dominant in Europe. Not the left-wing-but-with-slightly-lower-taxes right, but to a right that is no longer on the defensive. It is one that appeals to voters to embrace their national identity, heritage and sovereignty.

Let’s get into the weeds. This year’s EU elections were an important bellwether for European youth opinion. For the first time, all citizens over the age of 16 were eligible to vote in Germany, Austria, Malta, and Belgium, and all citizens 17 and older could vote in Greece. At the last EU election in 2019, the zoomer cohort (those born between 1997 and 2012) created the wave of support for green parties and earned the sobriquet “Generation Greta” after the Scandinavian eco-communist Greta Thunberg. Expecting this leftward trend to continue, leftist parties in Germany advocated lowering the voting age (against the wishes of the conservative AfD).

To these leftist parties’ surprise, many young people began shifting their votes toward national populist parties to address their concerns with Covid lockdowns, a 40-year high inflation rate, and record immigration. The shift was extremely strong in France. One poll shows that 32% of 18- to 34-year-old French citizens voted for the National Rally, more than double that cohort’s vote for the National Rally in the 2019 European elections. During the same election in France, the youth vote for the Greens and centrist parties collapsed, and the share of their votes cast for the far left grew slightly.

In Germany, the AfD saw an 11% jump in its vote share among 16–24-year-olds, compared to the AfD’s five-point rise among the broader population. In total, the AfD claimed 16% of the vote. The Greens, by contrast, hemorrhaged 23% of their 2019 youth vote. Even younger voters have also shifted to the right, as you can see in the school poll results below. Strikingly, another 6% of the under-24 vote went to a new leftist outfit called the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, an outgrowth of the Linke (Left Party). Like the populist right, this group criticizes mass immigration, doomsday environmentalism, and gender ideology.

In Poland, support for the hard-right Confederation Party among 18–29 years old voters increased from 18.5% to 30.1% from 2019 to 2024, making them that demographic’s leading choice. In Spain, polling of intended voters found that 22% of 18–24-year-olds planned to vote for the populist right parties Vox (12.2%) and Se Acabó La Fiesta  (The Party is Over) (9.8%). For comparison, Spain’s left-wing parties – the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), Sumar, and Podemos – had the combined support of 24.2% of the electorate in this age group.

The Belgian separatist Vlaams Belang Party took 21.8% of Flemish votes overall, up three points from its 2019 result. That makes it the second-largest party in Belgium. Polls ahead of the election showed that 32% of zoomer men intended to vote for them compared to just 9% of women in that age bracket. This difference mirrors the gendered polarization evident in most EU youth cohorts (besides that of France). Next door in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration Freedom Party, who as I noted HERE won the 2023 election by linking affordable housing to immigration restrictions, went into the election with 31% support among 18–24-year-olds. In Scandinavia, the national populist Finns Party, which came second in 2023 Finnish general election, was the most popular party among intended voters in all but the oldest (65+) age bracket. It was miles ahead of all the others among young men in particular.

The shift should not be overstated. Only a minority or plurality of young people voted for the populist right. Moreover, young people represent a shrinking proportion of the aging electorate, and one strongly polarized along gender lines (again, with the exception of France). Nonetheless, the youth shift to the nationalist right is clearly real, and it played an important part in their unprecedented success overall. What is driving it?

What Caused the Shift?

Three factors predominate.

First, is the rebelliousness of youth, especially of young men. Thanks to its seductive mix of immigration restrictionism, anti-wokenesss, and good aesthetics, the populist right has – perhaps improbably, given its origins in stuffy topics such as skepticism about the euro – acquired a subversive counter-cultural chic in recent years. It has been aided in this by the sheer awfulness of the intersectional elite hegemony, from its hideous “woke blobby” aesthetic to its hectoring “therapeutic totalitarian” methods, not forgetting the obvious personality disorders of so many of its adherents: a veritable anti-Woodstock in terms of sex appeal.

This transgressive vibe was captured in a video circulating on German social media earlier this month showing a group of attractive young men and women at a party on Sylt, a holiday island for the affluent, chanting “foreigners out” and “Germany for the Germans.” One of the intoxicated young men in the crowd even performs the banned Hitler salute (though more facetiously than earnestly, with one hand simulating toothbrush moustache). The result was a firestorm in the German media, demands for prosecutions from the German political class, and the immediate cancellation of all the individuals featured. But, like the rock’n’roll fans in the 50’s, the pilloried youth are not prevented by bans but enticed to listen more.

A related factor is the populists’ savvy employment of young voters’ preferred channels of communication – i.e. video apps such as TikTok and YouTube – where they have accumulated millions of followers, greatly surpassing their political rivals. This – along with data showing that young people in the EU get their information largely from Instagram (64% cite it as a source) and TikTok (25% cite it as a source) – gives them a significant edge over their establishment rivals. In Germany, for example, the AfD reaches as many young people on TikTok as do all the other parties combined (see below). It targets them with humorous and punchy content such as Maximilian Krah’s video on how to get a girlfriend by being right wing and avoiding porn. In France, the photogenic 28-year-old National Rally President, Jordan Bardella, is followed by 1.5 million people on Instagram and 615,000 on TikTok, fuelling talk of “Bardella-mania” among young women in particular (which may go some way to explaining the unique lack of gender polarization among French radical right youths). In many respects he personifies the sort of masculine identity construction that the radical right has successfully perfected online in recent years: gym-going, well-groomed, clean-cut, young, and masculine – in short, the opposite of the overfed, purple haired, soyified They/Thems of contemporary Leftism. Although this approach is short on detail, as Mary Harrington has observed, when politics is “about identity and belonging, a video can convey more visually in a few seconds than I could in a thousand written words.”

But the policy matters too, which leads us to the final and most substantive factor driving young people to right wing populism: they are ideologically anti-status quo. They believe that the establishment parties offer them little but generational immiseration. Their grievances have economic as well as cultural dimensions.

Not every young European gets to party on Sylt. Extremely high levels of mass migration mean that most must compete in the housing and labor markets with an ever-larger proportion of the developing world, pushing rents ever higher, wages lower, and property ownership out of reach for many. These effects are exacerbated by the disparate impact of Net Zero rules, which regressively impoverish those on the lowest incomes for little discernible environmental benefit. Then there was the burst of inflation generated by the war in Ukraine, which reduced incomes in real terms. The overall impression is of a broken social contract run at the expense of native youths for the benefit of pensioners and foreigners. Virally, this is captured in memes about long-suffering “Nicolas, 30 ans,” the struggling young professional who funds it all. Statistically it’a evident in a recent survey of German youths marking a shift to the right on policy issues. Young Germans are increasingly worried about inflation, expensive housing, social divisions, and immigration, and concerned less about climate change.

Why Does This Matter?

So, this is where the populist youth-shift has come from. But why does it matter?

Well for starters, if it’s sustained, the youth-shift will go a considerable way to challenge the left’s narrative about the supposedly inexorable rise of the “coalition of the ascendent,” i.e. of young people, college graduates, and ethnic minorities, whose hitherto left-leaning voting behavior encouraged predictions of leftist hegemony. Of course, this new challenge to the left presupposes that the gains the populist right makes amongst young voters are not offset by the loss of right-leaning older cohorts. This is a not insignificant risk, as a strategy reliant on social media outreach and charismatic personalities sometimes risks alienating middle-of-the-road older voters. We saw this in the case of AfD politician Maximilian Krah and his incendiary claim that not all SS members were necessarily war criminals. Right-wing zoomer voters may also be offset by the sheer volume of imported voters from immigrant communities, which will in turn depend on how effective populist parties are in delivering on their immigration policies in government. (For a cautionary tale in this regard, the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government is widely regarded as a disappointment on the issue.) All eyes will now be on Jordan Bardella and the National Rally in France, whose likely victory in snap elections later this month may come back to haunt them if they cannot make enough meaningful progress on border security ahead of the 2027 Presidential election.  

Second, this youth shift counters the left’s self-satisfied but intoxicating rhetoric about being on the “right side of history.” This narrative is already under pressure on other fronts, as I noted HERE with regards to transgenderism, HERE concerning the indefensibility of open borders, and as can also be seen in the recent turn against CRT & DEI ideology in the US (about which, more soon). If in addition to these setbacks they lose momentum among the youngest voters – i.e. those with the greatest personal stake in the future and the most idealistic reputation – their teleological self-image looks that much less credible. Tomorrow does not, in fact, necessarily belong to them if they cannot assuage younger voters’ concerns about the economic and social pressures they face or allay their sharply felt fears for their nations’ demographic and cultural survival.

The youth shift’s final implication concerns the need to update our ideological compass for navigating politics. The parents and grandparents of zoomers and Millennials were accustomed to a left/right spectrum with economic leftism and cultural liberalism at one end and economic liberty and social traditionalism at the other. Younger voters by contrast do not navigate on these terms. Despite the framing of national populist parties as “radical right,” they are ideologically eclectic on traditional metrics. Economically they range from free market small-staters like Confederation in Poland to big government protectionists like Marine Le Pen in France. Geopolitically they encompass both realists and anti-interventionists like Fidesz in Hungary, which would prefer to remain neutral over the war in Ukraine, and pro-NATO hawks like Giorgia Meloni. Culturally, parties such as the French National Rally and the Dutch Party for Freedom marry support for liberal values such as freedom of speech, sexual toleration, and gender equality with appeals for the preservation of national culture and greater protection from crime.

Indeed, European youth are largely motivated by the need to protect such hallmarks of Western liberalism from a pincer attack by wokeness, on the one hand, and imported fundamentalism, especially of the Islamist variety, on the other. Thus, the ascendant youth-powered right is likely to combine elements of cultural liberalism, immigration restrictionism, national ethno-traditionalism, and statist pro-natalism into a defense of the European way of life. This combination looks ideologically amorphous by boomer standards, but it is loosely unified by an overriding concern with demographic, cultural, economic security that neither the woke left nor the old big-business right seems willing or able to provide.  

It's Not Just Continental Europe

For all of these reasons, the Continental youth-shift is a significant political development. The final question is whether it is a pan-Western phenomenon, extending also to the UK and US and beyond.  As I noted earlier this week, the UK is likely to be an outlier in its overall shift to the political left, and this looks to be true of its youngest voters, too: current polling suggests Labour is set to win 50% of 18–24-year-olds’ votes and 42% of 25–34-year-olds’ votes. The populist right Reform UK party sits in fourth place in both cohorts, with 8% and 10% respectively – though that seems to be rising rapidly. A leftwards shift among younger British voters is perhaps unsurprising: 14 years of underwhelming governance by the neoliberal Tories have delivered staggeringly high immigration and cultural decay alongside unaffordable housing and real wage stagnation. Meanwhile, the British populist right has been held back by its association with Brexit, a project that is widely unpopular among the young. However, with Reform narrowly ahead of the Tories among 18–24-year-olds and its leader, Nigel Farage, now the UK’s leading political TikToker (his “lovely melons” clip currently has over 2 million views), and with Brexit fading into the rearview mirror as immigration becomes politically ascendant, we can at least say to keep an eye on Reform. Watch this space!

As for the United States, the evidence suggests a significant shift toward Trump could be coming among younger voters in November. This would be a huge reversal. Last time around, CNN’s exit poll showed that Biden won the 18–29-year-old vote by 24 percentage points, and Hillary Clinton won it by 19 points in 2016. A recent NYT/Siena poll, by contrast, has President Biden on just a two-point lead over Trump among 18–29s. Quinnipiac actually has Trump ahead by a point among registered voters between 18 and 34. Now, polling this group is notoriously difficult, so take these numbers with a grain of salt. But there’s enough evidence of a historic opportunity for Republicans that Trump has been courting younger voters with several policy shifts attuned to their preferences.

Doubtless prompted in part by the app’s popularity among younger people, he recently came out against a ban on TikTok, despite proposing such a ban during his presidency with support from Republican China hawks. Trump has also signaled a more conciliatory attitude towards the world of crypto-currency, which is most popular among young men, and recently vowed to end tip taxation, a move that would disproportionately benefit younger service-sector workers. He has also joined TikTok himself, posting his first video earlier this month. If these moves help to secure a shift of young voters to the right in November, in a country where no Republican has won them overall since 1988, we will have proof positive that the disruptive combination of right-wing youth radicalism, immigration restrictionism, and social media politics is by no means confined to the (Not-So-) Old Continent.

I always like to end my articles with positive recommendations. After all, this space is not meant to be about complaining, but about, well, restoration. So let me be clear. I am glad young Europeans are turning away from wokery, open borders, and Green nonsense. And I am glad that they are not as timorous as some of their elders in the face of false accusations of racism every time they note the economic or social costs attached to high mass migration. But they need to remember why their grandparents have more reservations about the extremes of nationalism. That is why we can never condone a Hitler salute, even an ironical one. It’s undoubtedly true that there are some genuine racists amongst Europe’s new right. They need to be identified, and they need to be weeded out. That is a serious task, and the right must take it seriously.

In my opening article for Restoration I talked about a sickly “vibe” in the air – the knowledge we all have that something has gone terribly wrong. Indeed, it has. But if you made it through this deep dive into the polling data, you now know that a new vibe is coming. Whether it leads to bright, sunlit uplands or some new abyss will depend on how the leaders of the youth-shift grow up in government.