Age is becoming a strange semi-determinate in European politics. As the nations of the continent have to deal with actual concerns relating to Russian aggression and rearmament owing to their time in Ukraine and potential invasion into the Baltic States and beyond, there is a sense of dread among younger Europeans that the lax political mainstream of old isn’t doing enough to address their concerns. This has led to a change in party preference among younger voters in Germany over the last two years where the new most popular party is the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland, a rise for concern among the nation’s mainstream as the old guard increasingly struggles to maintain the paradigm of center-right/center-left supremacy they’ve had for decades.
Next German federal election – Wikipedia
2021 German federal election – Wikipedia
To give an idea of how right-ward the youth vote is in Germany today, about 45% of the vote identifies with the AfD and the center-right Christian Democratic Union with the third largest party being the Greens at around 18%. These three parties alone constitute over half of Germany’s youth vote and reflect how the German youth have gone from supporting left-wing or liberal mainstream parties back in 2022 when they supported a combination of the Greens (27%), Free Democrats (17%), or Social Democrats (13%) by almost a similar margin. Even more interestingly, the decline in Die Linke, the far-left former Communist party in the county from East Germany, has been consistent with polling showing the numbers dipping from 8% to 6%. This is a more modest drop from the party’s general decline nationally, but shows how even their usual base of support isn’t inclined to vote purple/red (depending on how you define their chromatic breakdown in a given scenario). What does this all mean?
It means that young people in Germany are diverging away from the general trend of center-right/center-left parties gaining more acceptance among middle-aged voters in Europe whereas the United States is showing a clear youth enthusiasm gap for Republicans generally while Democrats trail with older voters in a generational divide issue. This could be because the financial situation in Germany has been mangled very severely with the concerns over immigration being just one of other problems developing. The point is that negative storms are brewing, and young people are stylistically seeing the right, an alternative to the failing traffic light coalition, as their best opportunity to change direction while dividing their support between the more sensible CDU and the more fringe AfD.
The ramifications for the next election if the polling continues in this direction for the parties is fairly clear. The Free Democrats and Die Linke are barely treading above water to stay electorally viable at 5% nationally while the Sahra Wagenknecht party list third party is threatening to take Die Linke voters away from the far-left party and drag both of them to obscurity. The Greens may have sacrificed all vestiges of their electoral viability under Olaf Scholz and have seen their general rise in 2021 fall off dramatically. The Social Democrats have flatlined leaving the CDU as the clear frontrunners to either lead the nation as the traditional mainstream center-right country to lead the party or allow the AfD to rattle the institutions of Germany to their core. Time will tell what will happen in the next German election.
The Conservatarian Millennial 