46 Europe The Economist April 16th 2022
Theboomerbulwark
I
f emmanuel macron, the youngestever president of France’s
Fifth Republic, gets to keep his job he will have its oldest voters
to thank. Had only the ballots of those under 60 been counted in
the first round on April 10th, Mr Macron would have come third—
leaving France to pick between extremists of the left and right in
the runoff a fortnight later. Across Europe, many mainstream
leaders owe their jobs to a greyhaired (and nohairedatall) elec
toral bulwark loyally trudging to the polls. They will not be around
for ever. Either today’s youngsters will have to mellow into the
middle ground as they age, or Europe will drift away from the pre
dictable centrism it has comfortably espoused for decades.
In Europe as elsewhere, voters’ preferences were supposed to
follow a predictable pattern as they aged. Brimming with idealism
and compassion their parents apparently lacked, younger citizens
tended to lean left. As they got older, took out a mortgage and dis
covered the pleasures of income taxation, the right’s appeal be
came more obvious. But this ideological drift often took place
within the same political party. “Big tent” affairs like Germany’s
centreright cdu,or psoeon Spain’s centreleft, contained fac
tions that could accommodate just about everyone from bleeding
hearts to the fiscally righteous. (Americans and Brits will also be
familiar with, in essence, twoparty systems spiced up by the oc
casional and usually marginal interloper.)
Many European countries today consist of two superimposed
polities. Voters in their 70s are hanging on to the big tents, Amer
icanstyle. German pensioners are turning out for the cduand its
rival spd, parties their own parents might have recognised. Dod
dering Irish stick with Fine Gael or Fianna Fail, nearcentenarian
political stalwarts. Their Italian counterparts are more likely to
cast a ballot for the Democratic Party or Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza
Italia; the Spanish for their rough equivalents and so on.
For the young, in contrast, centrist big tents are merely one op
tion among many. Ties that might have bound their parents to a
party—belonging to a church, say, or to a trade union—often no
longer apply. Their resulting political adventurism has helped
launch new movements across Europe: a slew of Green parties, the
odd (sometimes very odd) nationalist one, a few liberal splinter
groups. Some outfits that have emerged as a result are quirky, liketheFiveStar Movement in Italy, a shapeshifting party that got a
higher share of votes from younger voters than older ones in Ita
ly’s most recent elections. A few have nasty histories, like Sinn
Fein in Ireland: once a terroristadjacent group, among the young
it is now polling at well over the combined tally of the erstwhile
Fine/Fianna duopoly. In Spain both liberal parties and dema
gogues have sprung up on the far right and left. Outright xeno
phobes like Jobbik in Hungary and the Sweden Democrats, now
both somewhat reformed, got their breakthroughs from young
voters before establishing wider bases. In Germany afd, another
migrantbashing party, has been held back by voters over 70, who
are only half as likely as the wider electorate to support it.
The most successful of these political insurgencies can morph
into their own big tents. The En Marche!movement that propelled
Mr Macron to power in 2017 did so with roughly as many young as
old voters. Five years later, having become part of l’establishment
(and having pillaged the most recognisable talents from the So
cialists and Republicans, France’s old mainstream parties), Mr
Macron has babyboomers to thank for his success. Around 36% of
French voters aged 60 or above backed him, nearly twice the rate of
the under25s. Given that turnout increases with age, it was this
ballot bonanza which won him a clear firstround victory.
Why the generational divide? Young and old people think of
politics differently. Pensioners are loth to ditch parties that helped
secure the peace after a war they might remember, or decades of
subsequent economic growth. But all that millennials and those
in generation Z, from firsttime voters to 30somethings, have
lived through are two economic crises since 2008, with covid19
curfews to boot. The extreme left doesn’t seem so threatening to
those who do not remember the cold war. To older French voters
JeanLuc Mélenchon, a lefty firebrand, is alarmingly reminiscent
of crusty French communists who showed fealty to all things Sovi
et. Younger ones merely like his plan to soak the rich.
Plenty of youngsters rightly feel that mainstream politicians
mollycoddle senior citizens, who bought their homes before pric
es boomed, enjoy inflationproof pensions and leave behind high
public debts and an environmental mess. The class warfare of old
has been replaced by a generational divide. The boomers have
their political parties; later generations have theirs now too—rad
ical new ones, increasingly. Conventional wisdom once held that
youngsters, having sown their electoral seeds, would mature into
bigtent voters as they aged. That seems ever more doubtful. The
slide of the centrist electoral mastodons has continued for well
over two decades now. Oldies but goodies
Sticking to a dominant duo of entrenched parties is no guarantee
of moderation: look at America’s Republicans. Nor is fragmenta
tion a sure path to extremism. France ditched its two big tents in
favour of more centrism, not less. In Belgium and the Nether
lands, a dozen or so parties now sit in parliament. Elections are a
mere starting gun for the building of arcane coalitions that can
take months or even years. Parties on the fringes sometimes shore
up governing coalitions, but thus far have not controlled them.
The fragmentation of politics prompted by the young has in
jected competition into the public sphere. Good. But the old par
ties that dominated European politics at least did a decent job of
forcing extremists to fit their centrist mould or struggle forrele
vance. A new model is gaining ground. It will include a placefor
those whom older voters are currently keeping on the sidelines.nCharlemagne
The elderly are keeping Europe’s extremists out of power. For how long?