Young People’s Forms of Political Expression: Radicalization, Hostility to Democracy, and Disintegration in Eastern Europe?

For several years now, Europe has been facing a range of social, (geo)political, and economic crises that interlock, overlap, and exacerbate preexisting problems such as poverty, social inequality, and educational disadvantage. This did not begin with the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis. Rather, its roots go back to the financial crisis of 2008, and it continued in the form of the 2015 refugee crisis, the Brexit crisis of 2016–2020, the climate crisis—which has increasingly become the focus of public awareness since the Fridays for Future movement was launched in 2018—and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 with all its attendant consequences and uncertainties. At the same time, growing tendencies toward radicalization can be observed in parts of the population all over Europe. In Germany, for example, the Pegida movement, which opposes the perceived “Islamization of the Occident,” has a mindset that is racist and ethnic popular at its core and includes significant proportions of right-wing extremist thought. Another example is the storming of the Bundestag by right-wing extremists together with so-called Wutbürger (enraged citizens) and Querdenker (“lateral thinkers”), which must be regarded as an attack on democratic institutions and which—albeit on a smaller scale—was driven by similar motives to the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington, DC. The most recent example is the suppression of the Reichsbürgerbewegung (Reich citizens’ movement), which rejects the Federal Republic of Germany as a sovereign state and which was planning a coup and had already put together a shadow cabinet. In France, Marine le Pen, a right-wing populist candidate, only narrowly lost the last presidential elections. In contrast, Italy is now under the rule of a right-wing extremist party in the shape of Fratelli d’Italia, headed by President Giorgia Meloni. In Hungary, authoritarian and nationalist developments have been in evidence for several years, as is shown by the reelection of Viktor Orbán in 2010. Human rights are being systematically limited in Hungary, for example, by new laws against homosexuality and by a restrictive asylum policy. Additionally, the state of emergency imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic enables Viktor Orbán to rule by decree. Poland too has experienced a noticeable swing to the right. The right-wing conservative party PiS, elected in 2015, has not only effectively rescinded the right to abortion and penalized its practice but also implemented judicial reforms involving the passing of a number of laws that abolish the division of power and undermine the independence of the judiciary and the press in violation of principles of constitutionality (see also Bucholc & Komornik, 2019; Baczyńska, 2021). All these political developments may be read as expressions of growing social uncertainty and could ultimately suggest that democracy itself may be experiencing a crisis. Longitudinal studies on political socialization (Heitmeyer, 2002–2010) show that people in situations of uncertainty can tend to develop simplified, extreme values and orientations. The attitudes resulting from such a mindset are rooted in the feeling that they are losing control of their own values. This is all the more true when people are in danger of becoming isolated, when they have feelings of uncertainty about their personal goals, and when they feel helpless with respect to shaping their own future. The consequences of exclusion are demoralization, deprivation, and disintegration coupled with the subjective sense of being unable to control or influence the circumstances of one’s life. Against the background of these political developments and scientific findings, questions arise about the extent to which democracy in Europe is experiencing a crisis and how young people—the future of Europe—relate to democracy, what their political stances are, and what possible disintegration tendencies they identify from their own perspective. This serves as the point of departure for the present chapter, which seeks to supply concrete answers to these questions based on a representative survey conducted in 2021 among 9900 young people between the ages of 14 and 29 in seven Central Eastern European states. The study forms part of the broad-based, international youth studies commissioned and funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES; for more details, see Harring et al., 2023).