IF THERE IS ONE RECEIVED WISDOM IMBIBED equally by Left and Right it is that the kids are all woke. In Britain and the USA, support for left-wing parties correlates almost precisely with youth.
It was not always thus — young people were a decisive factor in electing Margaret Thatcher. But the dramatic left-ward shift of the youth vote encourages many left-liberals to believe that demographics are destiny and that time will bring the unstoppable triumph of progressive values.
One problem with this sweeping assumption is that it is parochially Anglocentric. In Europe, nationalism is primarily a youth movement, and a rapidly growing one at that. In Italy, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria, populist right-wing parties are not only in power, but enjoy their strongest support from younger voters. In France and Spain, the youth have abandoned centrist parties and now vote for either the far-left, or the far-right — the majority of French under-30s voted either for Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Melenchon in 2017.
In Finland, Austria, Romania, Greece, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, the greatest growth for nationalist and far-right parties has been among younger voters. The pattern isn’t repeated
