“One crisis layers on top of the other,” he told me. “The financial crisis of 2007-8, the migrant crisis of 2015, the environmental crisis, Covid, inflation after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and now again with the war in the Gulf.”
Leonard says different “tribes” have emerged out of these crises. Social media consumption and algorithms harden their differing perspectives, leading to a real sense of polarisation in Europe.
“We’ve already seen this in the US,” says Leonard. “A sense of ‘my crisis is more important than your crisis’.”
Nathalie Tocci, a former Italian government adviser who is now a politics professor at Johns Hopkins University, tells me we shouldn’t be so taken aback by the protests, or the youth engagement in them.
“We tend to think of youngsters as politically switched off and disinterested. We think they don’t bother to go out to vote etc, but they are truly engaged,” she told me, “just in a different, more grassroots way. Think of the “Fridays for the Future [environmental movement] across Europe a few years ago, or the demonstrations against Israel’s actions in Gaza after 7 October.
She points to the student-led protest movement in Serbia, which recently defeated long-standing leader Aleksandar Vučić in parliamentary elections. “It’s quite something. They kept going and going, for more than two years. What sticking power will these new European street demos have? That’s not yet clear.”
