How Farage has tapped into Britain's disaffected youth

As Labour and the Tories focus on older voters' needs, they are failing to heed the frustration of younger generations – guess who’s raising his pint glass to that, says Chloe Combi

- Chloe Combi

There is a quote often wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill that decrees: “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.”

It’s irresistible because, until quite recently, there was a truth to it: it was commonplace to find images of Che Guevara tacked onto university dorm walls next to Fight Club and Pulp Fiction posters, and equally common to find middle-aged men and women at dinner parties agreeing that “tax is too high and public services are wasteful” over an expensive plate of cheese.

However, over the last few years, the idea that progressive idealism is the preserve of the youth, while self-interest and protectionism are markers of age, has cracked profoundly. Increasingly, right-leaning politics resonate not just with boomers, Gen X-ers, or even millennials, but with the youngest voting generation - Gen Z - and this is showing up in global trends.

In Japan, the right-wing Sanseito party, with its “Japan First” stance and its staunchly anti-immigration populist rhetoric (despite foreigners accounting for only 3 per cent of the total population), is lighting up Japanese youth with slogans such as “Long ago, rock was a symbol of the anti-establishment... Using words, not guitars, as our weapons today, politics is what rocks!”

In Germany, the number of under-24-year-olds who voted for the far-right AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) rose by 11 percentage points between 2019 and 2024, and in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party scored 30 per cent of the youth vote in last year’s election.

In the USA, Donald Trump’s popularity surged 15 points among Gen Z men between the 2020 and 2024 elections, making the young male vote one of the decisive factors in returning him to the White House. In the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform party is the joint third most popular party among Gen Z men.