In France, the far-right National Rally (RN) took a 25 per cent share of the vote among 18-24 year olds, according to pollster Ipsos, up 10 percentage points compared with an around 8-point gain overall to 31.4 per cent.
To be sure, most of the youth in the EU’s two top powers still back leftist parties, and many worry about the latest trend.
“It worries me because I saw the far-right wants to deport people even if they have German citizenship like me,” said Ensar Adanur, 17, a German of Turkish origin. “But Germany is home for me.”
In Poland, however, support for the far-right Confederation among 18-29 years old voters increased from 18.5 per cent to 30.1 per cent, making them the leading choice for that demographic.
Mainstream parties “no longer have any credibility for me, the previous government and the current one show it clearly”, said Paweł Rurkowski, 30, an IT specialist who voted for the Confederation.
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Far-right parties’ relative proficiency in young voters’ preferred channels of communication – video apps such as Tiktok and YouTube and messaging app Telegram – is a big factor behind their increasing success with that generation, analysts said.
The recent German youth study showed that 57 per cent of young people get their news and politics through social media. But German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, like many mainstream politicians, only joined Tiktok a few months ago.
“If you are not on young peoples’ channels, you simply do not exist,” said Schnetzer.
Meanwhile social media platforms algorithms favour controversial messages that generate engagement over serious content, said Ruediger Maas, founder of the Institute for Generational Research in Augsburg.
The AfD’s lead candidate for the EU elections, Maximilian Krah, went viral on TikTok, for example, with dating tips for young men: “Don’t watch porn, don’t vote for the Greens, go out into the fresh air … Real men are right-wing.”
He has some 53,300 followers on Tiktok, compared with just 11,000 and 2,652 respectively for the lead candidates for the centre-left Social Democrats and the Greens.
“My generation doesn’t really know about politics but we hear about the AfD all the time,” said AfD voter Christoph.
In Spain, social media influencer Alvise Perez clinched 6.7 per cent of the youth vote, compared with 4.6 per cent of the overall vote, after conducting his anti-immigration and anti-corruption maverick campaign almost exclusively on Instagram and Telegram.
Far-right party Vox, meanwhile, which was strong on Tiktok, garnered 12.4 per cent of the vote among those under 25, compared with 9.6 per cent overall.
“It seems to be the only party that really opposes the government when it comes to taboo subjects such as immigration or gender discourse,” said Xavier, a 22-year-old university student who cast his vote for Vox.
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