05-07-2025
European democracy is in peril: failing, sclerotic elites are to blame
Is European youth giving up on democracy? The latest YouGov poll of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) suggests that only 57 per cent now support democratic forms of government, while one in five would prefer authoritarian rule.
In France, Spain and Poland, only about half of young people choose democracy. And criticism of the European Union is rising too: 39 per cent say that the EU is not very democratic. They see Europe as less influential than the authoritarian powers Russia and China.
This is the first generation to have lived their entire lives in the post-Cold War era. Yet they are deeply disillusioned with the freedoms their parents embraced when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Young men, in particular, are not just pessimistic: they are angry. Among those who see themselves as disadvantaged, just one in three supports democracy.
Why has the Europe that promised so much proved to be such a disappointment for a generation that has enjoyed the fruits of democracy?
The answer seems to be that they feel let down by complacent and incompetent elites who have been leading the Continent to perdition. Panicked by the pandemic, humiliated by Trump and menaced by Putin, Europe has never felt weaker or more irrelevant. No wonder the siren song of dictatorship is resonating once more.
It was assumed that the Nazis had inoculated Germans against autocrats. Yet many are now voting for the extremes of Left and Right. Nearly two thirds of young Germans see their democracy as endangered.
The blame for this lies with the governments of Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz, who have governed Germany for more than 20 years. Gen Z Germans have never known any other leaders.
Friedrich Merz, the new conservative Chancellor, has an uphill struggle to convince them that his government really will be different. His pledge to create Europe's biggest army to maintain Nato's credibility has been received with dismay by the young Germans who may have to fight for their country.
In Italy, a quarter of the young say they are sick of the unstable democracy which has allowed mass migration and stolen their prospects. Only Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy are authoritarian enough to stave off a re-emergence of Mussolini's fascism.
France is caught between the far-Left demagogue Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the faux-patriotism of Marine Le Pen and her musketeer Jordan Bardella. After seven years of Emmanuel Macron's posturing, the centre-ground of French politics is deserted, with Socialists, liberals and Gaullists almost extinct.
Half of French youth yearn for a strongman: a latter-day Napoleon or De Gaulle. To them, democracy appears as at best the preserve of self-serving technocrats, at worst a mug's game.
Europe's intellectual elites have done nothing to inspire a new generation with the glories of Western civilisation. Instead, their masochistic obsessions with decolonisation, race and gender have instilled what the American historian of Germany Fritz Stern called the politics of cultural despair.
The cause most promoted among students and other young Europeans has not been Ukraine, but Gaza. Instead of campaigning for an embattled democracy in the heart of Europe, struggling to survive against the naked aggression of an imperial war machine, Gen Z has embraced the death cult of Hamas and the theocracy of Iran.
Israel, sole beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East, has been demonised to the point where outrage aimed at a confected 'genocide' morphs into open anti-Semitism and protest marches escalate into terrorism. The Palestine Action attack on Brize Norton is only the latest of numerous incidents across Europe in which violence against individuals and the state has been normalised in the pursuit of 'justice' for Gaza.
Once deep disenchantment with democracy and the rule of law are combined with the justification of violence for political aims, it is a short step to dictatorship. Only a cult of the authoritarian personality is lacking — and the burgeoning of social media offers the means to create such cults.
Europe resembles a volcano, ready to erupt at any time. The radicalisation of Gen Zers leaves them prey to manipulation. Last weekend's scenes at Glastonbury, with chants of 'Death to the IDF', evoke the Two Minutes Hate described in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: 'A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.'
The novelist and Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, a Jewish refugee from Nazism, devoted much of his life to his 1960 treatise, Crowds and Power. People do not even need to be in the same place, like the Nuremberg rallies, he thought, to merge into a hate-filled mob. In fact, Canetti had anticipated social media.
Responding to Canetti's prophetic work, the poet Geoffrey Hill wrote: 'But hear this: that which is difficult preserves democracy; you pay respect to the intelligence of the citizen.' A dumbed-down generation is easy meat for those who emulate Trump and, like him, openly despise our political system.
After decades of condescension from the elites, the young are tempted by the Pied Pipers of populism, from Alice Weidel to Nigel Farage. Yet they may turn out to be enablers of Putin. For too long, the political class used democracy for their own benefit. Is the posterity of Europe, the youthful demos, now turning to the despots?
