The brown revolution starts now

The Greens have been voted out by young people, the AfD dominates. Other parties must adopt their strategy – and should finally learn from it.

Omid Nouripour looks lost. The Green Party leader is sitting on the couch wearing a tie, reading youthful phrases from his laptop screen: “slay”, “skibidi toilet”, “it’s fire”, “no cap”, he says – well, he stammers. At the end he asks his colleague behind the camera: “I didn’t understand a word, why do I have to do this? And what does it all mean?”

It is the last video that the Brandenburg Greens uploaded to their TikTok channel before the state election – calling on young voters to vote for the Greens. It is probably meant with a wink. But there is a lot of truth behind it, a lot of desperation: Nouripour does not understand young people. The Greens have lost them. And it is not just them who feel this way.

Gone are the days when young people skipped school on Fridays for climate protection, made polar bear posters in their free time and marched behind Greta Thunberg in big cities. “We are here, we are loud, because you are stealing our future” – that was yesterday. To be more precise: 2019.

Five years later, other images and other slogans dominate. “Germany for the Germans, foreigners out” yell young adults in a beach bar on Sylt with Aperol Spritz in their hands. The Young Alternative confidently sings the “deportation song” at the Brandenburg AfD election party: “Hey, now it’s happening, we’re deporting them all!” Hundreds of young neo-Nazis wearing combat boots and giving the Hitler salute protest against Christopher Street Days in East Germany.

This mood has also been reflected at the ballot box for some time: the AfD was already the second strongest force among young voters in the state elections in West Germany in autumn 2023, and then nationwide in the European elections in June. Now it has managed to come first in the age group in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg by a wide margin. And that with its most right-wing extremist associations.

For the AfD, this is an invaluable gain; young people are their greatest treasure. They see them as the vanguard of a major social change that seems possible. Where the youth go, they hope, the older, traditional voters will soon be drawn even more strongly. And for the nationalist wing in particular, the youth are a key future project: the last contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust are dying. Now they are beginning their attack with renewed vigor to open Germany up to racism and the relativization of the Nazi era from the roots.

“Don’t believe what’s written in history books!” shouts Björn Höcke at his events. Dozens of young people flock to his speeches to listen and then take selfies with him.

What is the main concern for people like Höcke is still an accessory for many young people. They are driven to the AfD by fear of the future, a sense of crisis and political disappointment. Migration and internal security are now also the dominant issues for them. Added to this are the scars that politics has left during the Corona period. The federal politicians as a whole emphasized how poor young people were. However, the expressions of condolence remained – until today.

It is therefore not surprising that one of the AfD’s main messages resonates even more strongly with young people than with adults: Why help others, why take in refugees? Us first!

The AfD knows full well that young people are more unstable in their voting behavior. That’s why they want to be smarter than the Greens. They don’t want the great exodus of young people to be repeated. They have to prevent the influx of young people from “splashing away” again, said AfD TikTok star Maximilian Krah in an interview. “We have the boys now and the girls, now we have to grab them and not let them go.”