Europe's Young Are Not That Woke - The Atlantic - 0 views
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ccording to the standard account, the 2008–09 economic crisis and the migration crisis of 2015–16 were bound to drive voters into the arms of the far right. Young Europeans were seen by some as easy prey for populists, as they had no memories of the bad old days of nationalism and war in the mid-20th century.
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In the European elections held earlier this year, Le Pen’s score among the young nearly halved, and the Greens triumphed, despite the efforts of the renamed National Rally to attract the youth vote by installing the charismatic 23-year-old Jordan Bardella as the lead candidate.
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Across the Rhine, Germans ages 30 and under gave the Greens their best-ever result in a national election. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, the right-wing nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) came in a distant sixth among the young.
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the far right collectively recorded a net gain of only 13 members in the 751-seat European Parliament.
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Young Europeans may worry about the environment, but for four out of five under-25s, it is not their No. 1 or even their No. 2 priority.
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Millennials and Gen Zers value public services; they worry about racial and other forms of discrimination, as well as about climate change. They are more pro-European than previous generations and more willing to hand over new governing powers to Brussels.
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A third of Millennial and Gen Z voters in Europe consider themselves centrists, compared with about a fifth who are on the center left and fewer than a 10th who are far left
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As in urban areas of the United States, rising costs for housing further squeeze the young’s spending power
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In Europe, by contrast, the under-30s are more disposed than their parents to view poverty as a result of an individual’s choice. Even as they still support the social contract typical for Europe, whereby the welfare state limits inequality and provides generous public services, they are also less in favor than older generations of fiscal redistribution to reduce inequality
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Before the crisis, the under-25s were not much more at risk of poverty than the over-64s. Now they are more than a third as likely to be poor.
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The short-run trend is therefore that the old will dominate in European politics. In 2017, for the first time, more than half of the voters in the elections for the German Bundestag were over 50
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most of them believe that the private sector is better at creating jobs than the state is, that work contracts should become more flexible, and that competition is good. Indeed, under-25s have a more positive view of globalization than do older cohorts.
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in Europe, Millennials and Gen Zers are not fundamentally different from the population as a whole when it comes to immigration. Survey data show that they have a more positive view of immigration (from inside and outside the EU) than do older generations. Almost as much as their parents, however, they want national governments and the EU to take additional measures to fight illegal immigration.
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it is worth taking a closer look at the Danish parliamentary elections held in June. The anti-immigration Danish People’s Party plummeted to 8.7 percent from 21.1 percent in 2015. But that was not because voters were frightened by anti-immigration policies. It was because the big center-left and center-right parties co-opted the far right’s agenda
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In the 1990s, it was Denmark’s Social Democrats who adopted “Third Way” social and economic policies, sometime before Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder. The Danes may once again be taking the lead. Sweden’s governing center-left party has already followed the Danish example by toughening its migration stance.
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Postelection surveys show that the CDU is now losing nearly four times as many voters to the Greens as to the AfD. Significantly, the Greens take pride in being the only party to have consistently defended Angela Merkel’s 2015 refugee policy without ifs or buts.
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In the U.S., the GDP per capita of the highest-income state (Massachusetts) is roughly twice that of the poorest (Mississippi). In the EU, by contrast, citizens of Luxembourg are more than nine times as rich as Romanians.
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There is also much less common history. Growing up in the Soviet Union has left older Estonians, for example, with very different views from older Spaniards, who grew up under Francisco Franco
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For many Central and eastern Europeans, the collapse of the Soviet Union was as much about restoring national independence as it was about restoring liberty and democracy. They have little appetite for ceding sovereignty to Brussels
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the younger groups on both sides of the former Iron Curtain seem to be converging on some issues, such as their support for democracy and EU integration. Yet this convergence is not visible on all issues.
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For younger voters in the EU’s original member states, ethnic and religious variables are much less important in defining citizenship than for their parents. For Central and eastern Europeans, however, where your forebears came from still matters. Indeed, young Hungarians and Croatians tend to associate ancestry with nationality even more than older generations do.
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A reverse dynamic is visible in Austria. In 2017, 30 percent of those ages 29 and under voted for the nationalist-right Freedom Party in the parliamentary elections. In May, having been hit by a scandal, the party came in third with the same age group (17 percent), far behind the Greens (28 percent) and the Social Democrats (22 percent).
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So why aren’t European young people as receptive to tax-and-redistribute ideas as their American counterparts? Perhaps because they know, from experience, that those policies can’t immediately fix what ails their countries.
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he politics of the future in Europe seems unlikely to resemble the politics of generational division in America. The continent is divided in many respects, but it does not face a “generation war.” The gap between the generations seems narrower, the political opportunity to mobilize younger voters less enticing.
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The German Greens started out in the 1980s as part of the antinuclear and pacifist movements. They were clearly to the left of the SPD. But in recent years they have moved decidedly to the center ground. Last year Winfried Kretschmann, the Green prime minister of Baden-Württemberg, and conceivably a future German chancellor, published a book with the surprising subtitle For a New Definition of Conservatism. Kretschmann cites Edmund Burke as an inspiration, arguing that the father of conservative thought favored gradual change over revolution.