Ian Buruma
Political rebellions of ten come in waves. Like ideologies and religious beliefs, they can be contagious. Young people are protesting in many parts of the world, in different ways, and for various reasons. India’s Cockroach Janta Party, a movement launched online by activists and students af ter the Supreme Court’s chief justice allegedly compared unemployed young people to cockroaches and parasites, led successful protests this summer against exam irregularities in higher education. It soon expanded its aims to include fair elections, press freedom, and women’s rights.
In Serbia, a leaderless student movement demanding democratic reforms toppled an increasingly autocratic government in parliamentary elections last month. In France, Italy, Albania, Germany, and many other places, young people are rebelling against governments they regard as sclerotic, corrupt, and clueless about how to address soaring wealth inequality, AI risks, climate change, and unemployment.
What these revolts have in common is a sense of betrayal and the conviction that the odds are stacked against the young, who can no longer hope to do better than their parents. In fact, many expect to do worse.
They believe that today’s political systems have let them down. In the words of Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister: “Liberal democracy itself is now on trial.” The student protests of the 1960s, in Western Europe at least, were almost playful compared to the rage felt by many young people today. The Parisian slogan of May 1968, L’imagination au pouvoir (“Power to the imagination”), would be unthinkable now. We live in a more dangerous world.
But amid the violence and looting in Paris, the police brutality in India, and the Molotov cocktails in Albania, some see signs of hope. The Guardian proclaimed that “a new type of democracy is taking hold” in Serbia after the student movement’s election victory, driven not by a common ideology, a party organisation, or a charismatic leader, but only by the desire for a more equitable and less corrupt society.
Perhaps in a new and better kind of democracy, there would no longer even be a need for parties. If liberal democracy is on trial, how effective will the protest movements be at improving it? Political pressure from protesters can sometimes lead to welcome changes. The fall of Serbian President Aleksandar Vui’s autocratic nationalist regime is a good thing. The Indian cockroaches managed to oust the education minister.
The French students in May 1968 may not have succeeded in radically changing politics, but they paved the way for greater social and sexual freedom. Protests in the United States helped shift public opinion in favour of Black civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, but more recent movements like Occupy Wall Street (2011) and Black Lives Matter (2013) did not force much political change. That requires political parties and people to lead them.
The civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s would not have gone as far as it did without President Lyndon B. Johnson strong-arming Congress into passing civil-rights legislation. Movements allow people to express discontent and unite around ideals, but they are not well-suited to political bargaining.
That is what parties are for: they represent interests, as well as ideals. Movements that prefer to do away with parties, viewing them as messy, self-interested, corrupt barriers to the achievement of ideals, are usually profoundly undemocratic, or at least illiberal. Such activists refuse to allow the purity of their ideals to be compromised by the give-and-take of democratic politics.
Another reason to be cautious about high expectations for youth protest movements is the mistaken idea that young people are necessarily on the side of liberalism and openness. Consider the quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”
If this were true, there must be a lot of heartless young people. It is easy to forget that Hitler was only in his 40s when he came to power. Most of his chief paladins in the Nazi movement were younger. While thousands of young protesters are in the streets rising up against corrupt mainstream parties and economic inequality, another cohort of their generation is engaging in a very different kind of politics.
Extreme ideas are firing up men and women in the youth wings of far-right parties. In Europe, the most successful leaders of these parties—Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Jimmie Akesson in Sweden, Alice Weidel in Germany, Jordan Bardella in France—are relatively young themselves and, at least on the surface, presentable.
Gone are the shabby old extremists with roots in the fascist past. These are slick, well-groomed professionals. They, too, have ideals, which are not at all liberal. But, unlike many youth activists, they are ambitious and have a taste for power.
Liberal democracy is indeed on trial. But it is in less danger from the young people protesting in the streets than from these smooth demagogues who know how to organise parties. Preying on the same political and economic anxieties fomenting today’s demonstrations, they might turn out to be more successful.
The writer is the author of numerous books, most recently, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah (Yale University Press, 2024).
