“Something remarkable is happening out there” among the youngest voter cohort of Generation Z, Nigel Farage said, hailing the surge in support for his anti-political establishment Reform Party.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage conceded while his party, now surging in the polls as Britain crashes towards a general election, is performing badly with millennials but is rapidly picking up support among the youngest voters. Telling an audience in Cheshire on Thursday “the one thing UKIP and the Brexit Party never succeeded in doing was reaching significant numbers of young people”, Mr Farage said Reform was now achieving just that.
Reflecting on his experiences on the campaign trail, Mr Farage said: “this is fascinating… Generation Z, ‘Gen-Z’, the 15-25s, something remarkable is happening, I mean truly remarkable is happening. And our support in that age bracket, is rapidly going up. The followings I’ve built up on TikTok, Instagram is amazing.”
He continued: “I’ve been sent these incredible pictures of young lads, English football supporters, wearing Farage masks. No, seriously! Sections of the crowd chanting my name. Something remarkable is happening out there, there’s an awakening in the younger generation who’ve had enough of being dictated to. Enough of being lectured to, and they’re seeing through the ‘B.S.’ they’re getting at schools and universities.”
A growing trend among the youngest voters has been noted elsewhere, no least by left-wing political magazine the New Statesman and British academic and pollster Matt Goodwin, who notes roughly twice as many ‘zoomers’ support Reform as they do the Conservatives. And at times, this leaves legacy outlets unsure how to react. Bizarrely, The Guardian has even felt the need to ‘debunk’ a clearly deepfaked Gen-Z meme of Nigel Farage griefing Rishi Sunak on a Minecraft server.
While more Gen-Z voters support Reform than the Green Party — long a key element of youth politics — the plurality is with Labour at the moment. Yet this trend bears a strong resemblance to what is happening on continental Europe where young people frustrated with unaffordable housing and high taxes look to the right for solutions. As reported earlier this month after the European Union elections, in Germany the Greens haemorrhaged support amongst the youngest voters, losing 23 points and dropping to fourth-place among 16-to-24-year olds.
Now, the top two parties for the German youth are the conservatives and the populist-right. This echoes previous polling which showed across Europe reducing migration had beaten out fighting climate change as a priority for voters.
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