Why are so many young people drawn to the far right? Polls show that 36 percent of French 18- to 24-year-olds support Marine Le Pen’s National Rally; and in the Netherlands, about 31 percent back Geert Wilders’ nationalist and xenophobic Party for Freedom. Meanwhile, a recent poll found that 26 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 prefer former President Donald Trump to incumbent President Joe Biden.
According to the criteria of
Although these figures do not reflect the opinion of the majority of young people, they are nonetheless surprising. For at least four decades after the end of the Second World War, being young was synonymous with being left-wing, wanting to improve the world and fighting for an open, diverse and egalitarian society in which fascism could never re-emerge. The far right, on the other hand, was associated with a scruffy old man, redolent of the brown or black shirt he might have once worn.
But this began to change in the 1990s. By then, many of the old extremists had died off, and the centre-left parties were losing their youthful idealism. The Soviet Union had lost the Cold War, and some of the enthusiasm for collective progress may have gone with it. Meanwhile, conservative and centre-left parties both fell under the sway of neoliberalism.
In 1998, Peter Mandelson, spokesman for the British Labour Party under then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, claimed that he “couldn’t care” if people became “filthy rich” as long as they paid their taxes. Mandelson’s statement, which he later regretted, reflected a broader political shift. Centre-left parties were increasingly tied to urban elites who benefited from a globalised economy in which immigrants provided cheap labour and educated cosmopolitans could seek financial gain or intellectual stimulation wherever they chose – elites whom those who felt ignored, scorned and forgotten by globalisation would come to disparagingly call “nowhere people”.
Many of these disaffected voters who had previously supported left-wing parties with historic links to the trade union movement – for example, Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US – now felt excluded by both pro-business conservatives and the neoliberal centre-left.
The Populist Spell
A new generation of right-wing populists rushed into the political vacuum, promising to fight for the disempowered and against a corrupt globalist elite that supposedly allowed immigrants to take jobs from natives. The late Austrian firebrand Jörg Haider; Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson; Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her deputy, Matteo Salvini, are prime examples of this new breed of politician. Slick, well-dressed operators with a talent for fascination and for stoking anger and resentment.
Trump is of the same cloth. He has always used the rhetoric of far-right radicals, offering the fantasy of a great American past and promising to keep out immigrants who “poison the lifeblood of our country.”
Such promises will inevitably appeal to some young people, for the same reasons that left-wing ideals once did. Take, for example, an 18-year-old German who told the Financial Times before the European Parliament elections that he would vote for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party because it offers “a clear break from a depressing present”.
Against the rising tide of radical populism are veteran politicians like Biden who are trying to preserve the established institutions of liberal democracy: judicial independence, a free press, and fair elections. Building or repairing those institutions in the wake of the catastrophe of World War II was a progressive project. But today, protecting them from those who want to destroy them and who miss no opportunity to attack the judges, legislators, and citizens who defend them is, quite literally, conservative.
To young people excited by the prospect of radical change, Biden at 81 may seem like a relic of the past, clinging to an outdated system. It could be argued, and I will be the first, that gradual democratic change is preferable to the destruction of the current order; but that idea is unlikely to bring restless young people back into the fold of traditional center-left parties. While Biden’s predecessor, Barack Obama, was able to do so for a time, he ultimately disappointed many of his younger supporters by not being as radical as many had hoped.
Trump does not need to convince many young people to vote for him. It would be enough if enough of them refused to vote for Biden (because he is too old, too conservative or too pro-Israel) for Trump to win the presidential election in November. And if he does, he will continue to destroy the norms and institutions on which the functioning of democracy is based.
Future generations may have to work hard to repair the damage, but perhaps this will reinvigorate the youthful enthusiasm for rebuilding a better world. Let’s hope they succeed.
Analysis by Ian Buruma, writer and editor. He was editor of ‘The New York Review of Books’.
#started #change #90s