Europe’s Zoomers on the March

Announcing his intention to stand as an MP in the deprived English seaside town of Clacton, Essex, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage stated that “something is happening out there”’ concerning the number of young people who insisted he return to frontline politics. This vibe shift at the upcoming British general election was foreshadowed earlier this month in Europe. The success of patriotic populist parties across the continent is driven by Gen Z: lacking homes and families of their own due to inflation, energy insecurity, and mass immigration. As I have warned, Zoomers will be a reactionary force—and they have started their march.

Born in or after 1997, Gen Z—Zoomers—have a different frame of reference for world events than their predecessors. The Second World War was more than 50 years ago. To them, the Berlin Wall never existed. Most won’t remember 9/11 on television. In Britain, Tony Blair’s promise that “things will only get better” turned out to be a lie. They only know their nation post-2008 crash, rendered unrecognisable by more immigration in under 30 years than between 1066 and 1945. The political paradigm of their lifetime has been managed decline. They have been indebted from conception, bereaved of a cultural inheritance and sense of historical belonging, and deprived of the chance to own a home to have children of their own in.

But generations are a Western 20th century phenomenon. Each is defined by a technological innovation or world historical event. For example, the Baby Boomers were the largest generation born after the Second World War and contended with the redefinition of the roles of the sexes after the invention of the birth control pill. Zoomers are digital natives: autodidacts, raised with access to a less curated and cumbersome internet than their millennial precursors. Forums spawned fandom communities, which in turn became petri dishes for political subcultures. (Hence why Gamergate was the first skirmish in the culture war.) Siloed in self-selecting political factions, Gen Z have a more fractured group identity than, say, the Boomers famous for Woodstock, protesting Vietnam, and rebelling with rock and roll.

For some Zoomers, that means being wedded to what Mary Harrington has dubbed the “Omnicause”: a set of seemingly incoherent positions on political topics, connected by their advancing the intersecting interests of aggrieved minorities. Their priorities change quickly—from climate change, to trans rights, to Palestine. These political flights of fancy have been pejoratively called the Current Thing™️. This churn is driven by the mysterious force at work in social media algorithms setting social trends. Conforming to these trends becomes the gatekeeping mechanism for friendship circles, job opportunities, and networking soirées. As such, some young people have a perverse incentive to derive all of their beliefs from what Instagram and TikTok present to them. They are children of the algorithm.

The division among Zoomers is between those fed information and incentives, and those who use the internet to source and set them for themselves. The liberal establishment’s policies and censorious culture encourage conformity among its ranks, meaning outspoken, iconoclastic ‘happy warriors’ have been exiled to the patriotic populist right. As the social media metagame grows more sophisticated, these savvier users have a greater impact on online discourse.

This is obvious on TikTok. Despite accusations that the algorithm pushes pro-trans and pro-Palestine content, and probably prohibits criticism of transgender ideology, the Right is dominating the platform. The Conservative Party creates and quickly deletes graphics as unpopular with young people as their policies. But, to the chagrin of British communists, teens are loving Farage’s TikTok content. His taunts of Rishi Sunak and Carry On-esque innuendos accrue millions of views and hundreds-of-thousands of likes. When hideous hoodlums and online prostitutes assault him, he turns it into a viral X meme and maintains momentum. This is because he has staffed his campaign with energised zoomers who understand the importance of social media. The reason Reform are now eclipsing the Tories in the polls is because Farage traded Richard Tice’s strategy of microwaving Thatcherism, capitulating to hit pieces by lying communists, and exclusively communicating through boomer broadcast media for memes and joie de vivre. It’s certainly working, as Reform is now the second most popular party with 18-24s.

This strategy delivered victories for other patriotic populists in the recent EU elections. In France, electoral maps look browner than San Francisco’s. Everywhere except Paris rejected Macron’s poundshop Napoleon act. Not that the French need an excuse to strike, but Macron—from his fuel tax to his pension reforms—keeps giving them options. French natives haven’t been the only ones lighting fires since 2017. A Rwandan asylum seeker set Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul cathedral in Nantes ablaze in 2020. Notre Dame Cathedral was incinerated in 2019—and hastily labelled an accident. This has become something of a trend in France, with one place of Christian worship destroyed every two weeks, two-thirds of them by arson. More of France burned when non-white migrants rioted last year, after a 17-year-old repeat-offender, French-Algerian Nahel M., was shot by police while attempting to flee from a traffic stop. Other racially aggravated crimes imported to France include the murder of a 16-year-old by nine migrants, who declared “We came to kill White people.”

National Rally president, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, has given voice to the grievances of native French peoples with his slogan “France is disappearing.” Like Farage, Bardella has amassed over a million followers on TikTok, and appears popular with women who stop him for selfies. Bardella used to record footage of himself playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2—infamous for how young men our age bonded through ruthless trash-talk in lobbies. He has also denied allegations that he once ran an anon account on Twitter, with such accounts influencing elections by generating infectious memes. As the second-youngest MEP in EU history, Bardella is an avatar of how Europe’s youth are shifting to the right—both because online politics is second nature to them, and because the liberal EU consensus is making their countries manifestly worse. As a result, 32% of them voted for National Rally.

This swing is most evident in Germany. Despite Alternative für Deutschland challenging the decision to lower the voting age to sixteen, they increased their vote share by eleven percent among 16-24s, securing 16.5% of the overall vote. TikToks by Maximilian Krah, advising young Germans “Don’t watch porn, don’t vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don’t believe you need to be nice and soft,” seem to have struck a chord.

But another organic viral trend brought Gen Z out in force for the AfD: across Europe, Zoomers have repurposed the 1999 pop song “L’Amour Toujours” as an anti-immigration anthem. German youths don’t have the handful of Japanese businessmen celebrating Oktoberfest in mind when calling for mass deportations. Rather, ‘Ausländer raus’ is directed at the millions of MENAPTS (migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey) who have milled about in Germany’s metropoles since Mutti Merkel said “Wir schaffen das.” As studies from Denmark, the UK, and the Netherlands have consistently shown, this cohort—which comprises the majority of asylum claims—never become net tax contributors. In Germany, 45% of benefits claimants are immigrants; in Austria, 60%. No wonder aspirational youngsters, squeezed between paying healthcare and pensions for boomer retirees and housing the Third World and his three wives, want to deport foreign dependents.

Indeed, it’s not just the thymos of charismatic politicians convincing men to return to tradition. A constant supply of videos of migrants stabbing police officers and politicians, advertising women and girls in vulnerable states to prospective trafficking clients, and boasting about their tax-payer subsidised lifestyle has enraged those of us working, saving, and doing the right thing. Consistent polling has shown that young men are affiliating with conservative parties earlier than we might have been led to expect. This is not, as the BBCscaremongered, proof that the continent is on the precipice of recycling the 1930s. This is a desire to punish a neoliberal, open borders establishment for depriving them of the same sense of cultural belonging, and opportunity to earn a living, own a home, and have a family, afforded to their grandparents. 

And even if it were the exclusive domain of an elusive ‘far-right,’ the inevitable consequence of Gen Z being more ethnically diverse and value-pluralist than their predecessors is that the narratives of the past do not lay like a dead hand on their conscience. An insistence on ignoring ethnic and cultural differences just doesn’t wash when you’ve been raised with them all around you. This doesn’t, thank Heavens, lead ineluctably to the rise of a Fourth Reich. Politicians need only respect the democratic mandate, and stop economically, culturally, and demographically impoverishing the host populations they purport to represent

For Farage and those like him to act as lightning rods for the exuberance of dispossessed Zoomers, they must do more than promise to tinker at the edges of an obsolete post-war paradigm. They must make good on their promises to deport the more than 1 million illegal foreigners who hinder young people’s potential to live humble, law-abiding lives. If they do, it could well mean Labour’s promise to give 16-year-olds the vote backfiring spectacularly.

And to anyone who laments what the Zoomers have become, I should remind you: you made us.