Democracy remains popular across the world, but faced with a global array of challenges from inequality to the climate crisis, young people are far less likely than their elders to believe it can deliver on what concerns them.
According to a major international survey of 30 countries published on Tuesday, 86% of respondents would prefer to live in a democratic state and only 20% believe authoritarian regimes are more capable of delivering “what citizens want”.
However, only 57% of respondents aged 18 to 35 felt democracy was preferable to any other form of government, against 71% of those over 56, and 42% of younger people said they were supportive of military rule, against just 20% of older respondents.
I wish I could say I was surprised. Here in Finland we had a parliamentary election earlier in the year and ended up with the most right-wing government we’ve ever had, with zero leftist or centrist parties in the government. One fresh minister had to quit his post due to being a neo-Nazi, and the extremist party whose ministerial post it currently is replaced him with a pedophile neo-Nazi (who won a vote of confidence, so apparently that’s not a problem to anybody but leftists.)
Almost half of the under-25’s voted for right-wing parties. The most popular one was an extremist right-wing party (multiple neo-Nazis, politicians who openly fantasize about eg. murdering gay people, the works), and 2nd most popular was the “fiscally conservative” party (who really aren’t much better than the extremists, and in many ways actually worse).
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Democracy remains popular across the world, but faced with a global array of challenges from inequality to the climate crisis, young people are far less likely than their elders to believe it can deliver on what concerns them.
According to a major international survey of 30 countries published on Tuesday, 86% of respondents would prefer to live in a democratic state and only 20% believe authoritarian regimes are more capable of delivering “what citizens want”.
At a time of multiplying national and international crises – respondents were most worried about poverty and inequality (20%), the climate crisis (20%) and corruption (18%) – more than half (53%) felt their country was heading in the wrong direction, and about a third said politicians were not working in their best interests.
About 70% of the more than 36,000 people surveyed said they were worried the climate crisis would affect them and their livelihoods in the coming year, with those in Bangladesh (90%), Turkey (85%), Kenya (83%) and India (82%) the most concerned, and in China (45%), Russia (48%) and the UK (54%) the least.
At a national level, however, corruption was the chief worry, with an average of 23% saying it is the top issue facing their country – ranging from 6% in Germany and 7% in France and the UK to 45% in Ghana, 44% in Nigeria and 37% in Colombia.
Of issues most directly affecting people personally, poverty and inequality ranked highest – including in Senegal, the smallest economy surveyed, and the US, the largest – with an average score of about 21%.
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