Youth Voter Migration: They are so free

Less than half a year ago, the German public was perplexed by the conclusion that young people were now right-wing. Opinion polls, state elections in the East and the European elections seemed to paint a picture of adolescent right-wing radicalism. There is not much left of that after this federal election. The diagnosis that is currently being used in discourse is that of a youth shift to the left; six percent of the votes of under-25s for the Left Party in the European elections became 27 percent in the federal election. "The Left is back" is one of the headlines, as is Jan van Aken's statement that the mood within the party is euphoric. All of a sudden, his party shot out of insignificance.

The main provisional explanation for this development is the perceived overwhelming effect of Tiktok - probably because the platform itself brings with it a number of fears, not least that of the unknown. It is said that Die Linke has cracked Tiktok and is therefore so successful with young voters, while elsewhere people are already talking about the "Tiktok election campaign".

Whether this is all true is another question. Why should Tiktok in particular not only induce a political opinion among people under 25, but also its high volatility? After all, social media now permeates every age cohort, and the infamous short videos can also be found on Facebook , Instagram and YouTube. The question of causality arises anyway: are the videos or their content responsible for the election? So it is much too easy to find the cause of the successful turnaround in just one particularly successful media campaign. A distinction must be made.

The fact that such a voting ratio has emerged among young voters is not particularly remarkable at first, although one is already dealing with rumbling doubts at this point. Could it not be that adults, mostly women as in the case of the Left, have formed a political opinion relatively autonomously given the circumstances? The assumption that one is dealing with the predictably fickle characters of a particularly decadent section of the "society of consumers of political opinion products" (Eberhard Straub) is not only democratically questionable, but also cheap. This approach inevitably leads one to psychologism, a fruitless attribution, a black box of knowledge. Instead, a look behind the digital propaganda tools is required. They are based on a social substrate. This is what is at stake.

A year ago, the tireless industry of sociology, in the person of Anton Jäger, coined the term "hyperpolitics". It describes a specific political dynamic of contemporary Western societies: their level of organization has been steadily declining since the 1990s. Churches, unions , associations and especially parties have been bleeding out for more than thirty years, while individualized networking has increased significantly. At the same time, there can be no talk of post-political conditions (anymore). In line with the institutional dismantling, general politicization has reached an almost shrill level, if we follow Jäger. Extremely short "hype and outrage cycles" are spreading in this "disorganized democracy": "Atomization and acceleration go hand in hand."

If politics is the "drilling of hard boards" ( Max Weber ) and this also describes an eminently temporal dimension, then at best the most that is currently being done is to glue together veneer boards. It was not for nothing that in 2011 the eternally coquettish Leninist and philosopher Slavoj Žižek stood in the midst of the anarchic, directionless Pirate Party role models of Occupy Wall Street and in a speech he precisely anticipated the pitfall that this reluctant movement and its imitators would ultimately and defiantly fall into: "Carnival parties are cheap - the true test of their value is what remains the day after, how our everyday lives change. Fall in love with hard and patient work - we are the beginning, not the end." As Jäger knows: choreography is not organization.

This concept could now be subject to a factual objection. Haven't almost 25,000 people joined the Left Party since the beginning of January 2025 alone? However, such occasion-related waves of entry are not uncommon and often fizzle out quickly - just remember the dynamics surrounding Martin Schulz 's candidacy for chancellor. This time too, it is completely unclear whether the members can be retained and whether the majority of them will not end up as dead files again. A structural return to social mass organization is not in sight.

The connection between atomization and volatility can also be based on an explanatory model that is at least materialistically informed: social cohesion is disintegrating due to the end of the dominance of the so-called standard employment relationship, drastic austerity measures, rapidly increasing inequality and the decimation of trade unions, which is partly politically enforced. It is to be hoped that this does not offend a colleague of the cultivated diagnostics of the times, Andreas Reckwitz, who also put his stamp on a post-industrial "culture of singularization" by means of a very self-confident italicization strategy.

The subtle irony of this decidedly left-wing theory is that it is ultimately almost indistinguishable from conservative institutional theory and its criticism of free-floating individualism. When Anton Jäger calls for a "reinstitutionalization" of political engagement, he draws on - without explicitly mentioning it - the insight into the ordering capabilities of social structures developed by Arnold Gehlen in the last century.

The sociologist, who is completely unsuspected of progressivism, has condensed the basic pattern of his theory of institutions in a worthwhile essay with the telling title "On the Birth of Freedom from Alienation": "Man can only maintain a permanent relationship with himself and his peers indirectly; he must find himself again in a roundabout way, alienating himself, and that is where institutions lie." Gehlen's considerations correspond with an anthropology of the indirect self-relationship, as expressed at the time, for example, in Helmuth Plessner's talk of eccentric positionality.

It is therefore precisely the integration of the individual into a social context that transcends him that enables him to have real self-determination, and in this context that means above all: permanent self-determination. One does not have to go as far as the conservative paranoid Gehlen, who saw the enthusiastic feeling of freedom as the "pacemaker of the guillotine", to recognize the risk of massively shrunk time horizons and political fluctuations against the background of the election results; that is, what Jäger aptly calls the "mode of viral panic", which TikTok etc. merely play on in the media. If the parties, and of course the Left Party in particular, want to be able to rely on election gains in the future, this will probably require the downright absurd imperative of daring to become more alienated.

The demand for re-institutionalization, of course, harbors a fundamental tension between socialization and self-realization. From the perspective of the individual, it is not immediately clear what exactly is supposed to speak against Tiktok hedonism and erratic voting behavior depending on the situation. The formation of society is not an exercise in the secondary virtue of stability for Jäger, Gehlen or Žižek, but is their concern because they have something planned for it. Jäger is clear on this, Gehlen less so.

This in turn speaks for calmness in the face of the phenomenon of a sudden perceived voter movement. The latter arise from the freedom of choice of people who do not want to link their life plans with politics for better or for worse. They live from the juxtaposition, not the identification, of the personal and the political. There has never been less populism.