49
and inequalities of their era. “We grew up
around people who have struggled to put
food on the table,” Nadia Whittome, who
was just elected the U.K.’s youngest par-
liamentarian at age 23, tells TIME. “We
know that the crises we’re up against are
huge in scale and that the solutions to
them need to be equally bold and imple-
mented urgently.”
What unites these movements
is a desire to tear down and rebuild
structures built by past generations. In
Europe, the experience of postrecession
austerity measures has cemented a new
commitment to social reforms and greater
public spending among the young, and
their leaders are following suit. Youth-
led protests in Hong Kong, India and
Sudan are rebelling against conservative
and repressive leadership, while in Iraq
and Chile they are demanding an end
to corruption. In Lebanon, where anti-
government protests drew a quarter
of the population to the streets, young
protesters have called for a complete
overhaul of what they see as a broken
political system. Across the Middle
East, the outsize hopes engendered by
the 2010 Arab Spring uprisings have
been shattered by harsh government
crackdowns combined with economic
stagnation, according to a new survey of
Arab youth. “For a generation of young
Arabs,” Jihad Azour, director of the IMF’s
Middle East and Central Asia department,
writes in the survey’s preface, “a decade
that began with the promise of change
nears its end with tens of millions still
longing for peace, prosperity, and the
opportunity for a better future.”The experience of today’s older
generations might suggest the young will
shift rightward as their stakes in society
grow. After all, today’s conservative-
voting boomers came of age amid the
countercultural revolutions of the 1960s.
But today’s youth are unlikely to shed their
progressive values over time, according to
current research. “Young people now are
more socially liberal than young people
were in the past,” says Matt Henn, a
professor of social research at the U.K.’s
Nottingham Trent University. “People’s
views on key values such as concerns
over the climate emergency, support
for investment in public services rather
than privatization... are not necessarily
going to dissipate over time. These
are fundamental values that, research
suggests, broadly stay with people into
later life.”
This new generation of young leaders is
not exclusively liberal, however. Austria’s
Kurz is a conservative, right- leaning
nationalist. Yet as head of a coalition that
now includes the progressive Green Party,
he will have to answer to the demands of
younger activists and voters. And they are
increasingly impatient for change; today’s
youth activists, fearful the time to act is
running out, expect progress and delivery
on an accelerated time table. That, even
more than their progressive tendencies,
is likely to shape policy for years to
come, no matter the age of their leaders.
—With reporting by Joseph hincks/
isTanbul and billy perrigo and ciara
nugenT/london □INVENTING
THE FUTURE
Riya Karumanchi
LOCATION: Ontario, Canada
INVENTION: SmartCaneW
hen she was 14,
Riya Karumanchi
met a woman
who used a white cane to
navigate. Riya was surprised
that even with the cane,
the woman struggled to get
around. As a tech-obsessed
teenager, she assumed
the cane came loaded with
cutting-edge technology.
“It’s just a stick,” Riya says.
“My initial thought was
like, What? How is nobody
working on this?” So she
engineered a device now
called SmartCane. This
stick can sense wet surfaces
and other obstacles,
vibrating to alert the user to
treacherous situations. GPS
navigation gives directions
using patterned vibration
and audio. An emergency
button acts as a lifeline
to emergency responders
or loved ones. Riya is
now 16, the SmartCane
team numbers three, and
the effort has more than
$83,000 in funding. The
team’s hope is to one day
distribute the product
through the Canadian
National Institute for the
Blind. ÑShay Maunzpublishes weekly
magazines for U.S. elementary
and middle school students