Democracy remains popular across the world, but faced with a global array of challenges from inequality to the climate crisis, young people are far less likely than their elders to believe it can deliver on what concerns them.
According to a major international survey of 30 countries published on Tuesday, 86% of respondents would prefer to live in a democratic state and only 20% believe authoritarian regimes are more capable of delivering “what citizens want”.
However, only 57% of respondents aged 18 to 35 felt democracy was preferable to any other form of government, against 71% of those over 56, and 42% of younger people said they were supportive of military rule, against just 20% of older respondents.
I wish I could say I was surprised. Here in Finland we had a parliamentary election earlier in the year and ended up with the most right-wing government we’ve ever had, with zero leftist or centrist parties in the government. One fresh minister had to quit his post due to being a neo-Nazi, and the extremist party whose ministerial post it currently is replaced him with a pedophile neo-Nazi (who won a vote of confidence, so apparently that’s not a problem to anybody but leftists.)
Almost half of the under-25’s voted for right-wing parties. The most popular one was an extremist right-wing party (multiple neo-Nazis, politicians who openly fantasize about eg. murdering gay people, the works), and 2nd most popular was the “fiscally conservative” party (who really aren’t much better than the extremists, and in many ways actually worse).
@interolivary thank you social media.
I unironically do blame the internet and especially social media. Used to be that shitty people often got either “lectured” or shunned by the society around them, which seems to have created more opportunities for them to go “what the fuck was I thinking, I was so wrong”. Now they go online and find millions of even worse people and feel like their ideas are actually accepted and valid in general and not just among other shitheads.