How the far-right gained traction with Europe's youth
How the far-right gained traction with Europe's youth
From Germany and France to Poland and Spain, the far-right made inroads into the youth vote in key states in this EU election - as a generation that has grown up amid constant crises seeks new answers and follows politicians fluent in TikTok and YouTube.
Young voters, traditionally perceived to be more left-wing, drove the wave of support for environmental parties at the last EU election in 2019, earning the nickname "Generation Greta" after the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
But following the pandemic, the Ukraine war and cost of living crisis, many shifted their support this year towards far-right populist parties that tapped into their concerns, fuelling their overall rise in the June 6-9 EU parliament poll.
With the leaders of Europe's often upstart ethno-nationalist, anti-establishment movements mastering new social media better than their mainstream counterparts, they are earning cachet as a subversive counterculture among some young people.
They appeal in particular to young men who feel left behind and censored by an increasingly "woke" mainstream, analysts say.
(also, disenfranchised apolitical strata feeling impotent being promissed easy solutions to a systemic problem caused by the ruling class)
You can sum up 400 years of European history with this one image
Tiktok and Facebook.
Literal fountains of stupidity.
Social media was a mistake.
No mention of immigration? That’s a big reason
It's a diversion
They won't say it out loud...even though it's a massive part of it. The youth are staring at a shit load of immigrants from hard right religious countries yelling at how they want to turn their country into a Shira law shit hole...but no it's the social media...
They meddled with the Islamic countries beyond what befalls them, and they helped the worst of the extremists come out in the instability they helped create.
Besides, being some of the worst offenders on climate pollution per capita by far and making someone else's homes burn to global warming first was bound to create these refugees whether those ecuador countries were stable and tried to counter the local symptoms or not. I'm not saying advancing the comfort of human living is a sin or anything zealous like that. All I'm saying is that glossing over personal and corporate consumption while neglecting apt measures in favor of decoy policies and trying to reflect the blame somewhere else was bound to have the problem become bigger and more apparent.
They reap what they have sown over the last few decades. Trying to put up a gunship and gunboat barrier over Greece while bribing the corrupt Turkish president to keep over millions of Syrian refugees, let aside others flooding illegally in groups of hundreds from Afganistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, etc. will work so far to keep the facade on.
Rising fascism in Europe is not a defense against the religious extremists. It is due to desire for continuity of personal comfort and freedom in the face of reckoning day, by ensuring those who they fucked over can't come near and try to share in their abundance of resources.
It's Russia/Internet Research Agency.
I think this aspect of far right recruitment is the same everywhere: Wealth disparity and a strong, negative news cycle drive people to anything that claims to be against the established order.
And despite all of this being a direct result of 40 years of ring wing policies (Reagan, Thatcher, privatization, deregulation, etc.), they successfully pinned it on liberals the the left at large and declared those to be the establishment.
It is all too easy for someone wanting to rebel against the existing system to fall into the hands of this far right "counter-culture."
This is a fairly predictable consequence of economic stagnation. France is still below its pre-Covid level of GDP per capita, while Germany only caught up. Both countries, and most other countries in Europe, seem to be permanently stuck at a GDP per capita level 20-30 percent below the US.
There are lots of excuses for Europe's lower economic dynamism relative to the US, about how it's a trade-off for improved quality of life (more vacations, etc). But young people benefit disproportionately from dynamism, because they're the ones working their way up. If young people want economic opportunities and the economy doesn't give it to them, you'll see the frustration appearing at the ballot box.
I feel like this has occurred before... 🤔