Bundestag election ǀ Youth without a state for liberalism – Friday

by time news

Two days before the election, the band Tocotronic released the song Youth without God against fascism, a sweet bow to young people who stagger aimlessly but anti-fascist through life.

Two days after the election it is clear: the youth that Tocotronic are singing about has become a rarity. “Youth without God for Liberalism”, Maurice tweeted Buzz, Head of the Staatsakt label, on Monday. What he alludes to: In this general election, the FDP is the most popular party in the first-time voter cohort. 23 percent voted for the Liberals, closely followed by the Greens with 22 percent. The last places are occupied by the AfD and the Left Party.

Cheers in the Axel-Springer-Verlag: world-Chef Poschardt dutifully and as expected began to transfiguration and announced semi-factually: “Green propaganda leaves unadjusted youth unimpressed”. Elsewhere you dared to approach the truth: Yasmine M’Barek smoothed the excitement Time online with facts, pointing out that the Liberals have not just been popular with younger people this year. Surprise about this is particularly revealing: “Apparently, liberal and conservative young people rarely have their say in public debates – or they are not heard.” The reporter Bent Freiwald spoke – hard to believe, but it works – with real young people. Among other things, he determined the following: The kids attached great importance to personal responsibility, did not see digitization as a secondary topic and would have felt abandoned in the corona crisis. Strange. You isolate them for months, shoo them out of the parks, offer them no compensation for their frayed educational path – and then do the young people no longer trust the state? A mystery.

But slowly: The “youth without God for liberalism” is primarily a phantasm, because a quarter of the first-time votes is just a quarter. But this district is anything but inexplicable. In the most important youth culture, Deutschrap, neoliberal narratives are omnipresent: hard work that pays off (at some point, presumably), the state and the rest of the world as an enemy against whom one has to assert oneself. The social media world – especially on the Instagram and Tiktok platforms, which are very popular with younger people – is bursting with fitness and self-optimization, in line with the advertising market that finances this world. the FridayAuthors Ole Nymoen and Wolfgang M. Schmitt recently wrote about this in their book Influence well presented.

One could also think about the ways evoking achievement and assertiveness shapes awareness in schools. What does it do to young people when they wake up day after day in a society that is geared towards merciless competition? And what exactly should you think of a reality in which a permanent job after 18 years of education is just as utopian as watching a YouTube video on the regional train between Leipzig and Chemnitz?

Where there are not even minimum requirements, self-righteousness flourishes and the willingness to show solidarity dwindles. That is to be understood. But you also have to want to understand it. Anyone who finds “youth” mysterious usually only proves that they have nothing to do with them.

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