On February 23, German voters will elect a new federal parliament, and many expect the country's established political parties to lose ground. In recent elections – for the European Parliament in June and in the East German Länder (federal states) of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg in September – young voters flocked to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. In the three eastern states, for example, 31-38% of voters under the age of 25 voted for the AfD.
It was a shocking shift: in the 2021 federal election, young Germans largely supported the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), which won, respectively, 23% and 21% of the vote among 18- to 24-year-olds and 21% and 15% among 25-34 year-olds. Building on this success, the Greens and the FDP formed a new government with the Social Democrats. Hopes were high that the "traffic-light" coalition, named for the three parties' colors, would address the economic concerns of the young voters who helped bring it to power.
That did not happen, and young Germans – like their counterparts across the democratic West – have swung to the right, into the arms of the populist AfD. A 2023 study suggests that the growing appeal of such parties can be explained by zero-sum thinking. The belief that groups gain only if other groups lose is deeply embedded in populism, which sets itself against global elites, the deep state, or foreigners whose success is believed to come at the expense of locals.
The study's authors found that zero-sum thinking tends to prevail when resources are scarce. That is certainly the case in Germany, where the economy has stagnated since the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving young people with limited job prospects and little chance of moving up the income scale. Young Germans are facing one of the lowest rates of social mobility among OECD countries. Improving their economic prospects and increasing social mobility should be a high priority for the next German government.
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