Recent surveys converge: young adults are interested in politics, but they vote intermittently, gather at the two poles of the political spectrum and, a new development, young women and young men are diverging ideologically. I bring together here the studies that document these shifts, and I propose to read in them a demand for justice and dignity, one that democracy can answer if it accepts to question itself.
A generation reputed to be depoliticised
The reasoning seems self-evident: young people rarely vote, therefore they are no longer interested in politics. The first part of the sentence is more or less accurate, the second is false. Anne Muxel, research director at the CNRS and at CEVIPOF, who has been studying the political experience of young people for decades, published at the end of 2025 a synthesis of ten years of the “Fractures françaises” survey. Her conclusion is clear: young people are “neither undergoing depoliticisation, nor uninterested in politics”. They express choices and adopt behaviours, but within a relationship to citizenship that has been profoundly renewed, and which we misread as long as we measure it by electoral turnout alone.
A methodological clarification before going further. The studies I draw on divide up youth in various ways: 18-24 year-olds for electoral surveys, 16-26 year-olds for European comparisons, under-35s for long-term series. My focus here, as throughout this section of the site, is on 15-25 year-olds, the age bracket in which one leaves the captive audiences of school, becomes autonomous in one’s choices, and builds the practices of the adult one will be, cultural practices and political practices alike.
Voting has become a right, no longer a duty
The sociologist Vincent Tiberj proposed, in Les citoyens qui viennent (PUF, 2017), a reading key that seems decisive to me. Generational renewal produces citizens who are politicised differently. The generations born after the baby boom grew up in a culture of individual autonomy and critical distance; they no longer experience voting as a duty to be performed at every election, but as a right to be used when the stakes justify it. Tiberj speaks of “distant citizenship”: a majority of voters born from the 1960s onwards vote intermittently, and this intermittence deepens with each generation.
Engagement does not disappear for all that, it relocates. The studies gathered by Laurent Lardeux and Vincent Tiberj in Générations désenchantées ? Jeunes et démocratie (INJEP / La Documentation française, 2021) show that young people reject not politics so much as the political offer presented to them through representative democracy, and that they express themselves through other channels, petitions, demonstrations, boycotts, community involvement, speaking out online. Institutions that measure citizenship by turnout alone therefore read disaffection where there is relocation.
The phone, first terrain of this politicisation
This relocation has a place. The sociologist Aurélien Djakouane, in an interview given to the Observatoire des politiques culturelles and in his article “Un portable sinon rien ?” (L’Observatoire, no. 60, April 2023), shows that for the younger generations, cultural practices and digital practices merge. The phone has become their main cultural terminal, the place where one listens, watches, reads, creates and exchanges. Djakouane approaches these uses as an understanding researcher rather than an alarmist one, and I share this position: he observes that young people’s cultural outings are not declining, and that their digital uses feed practices with a strong collaborative value, marked by the desire for interaction and expression. That issue no. 60 of the journal, devoted to “Youth, politics and culture”, is also the one in which I published my own contribution, which I present in OPC Media : « What if we changed our posture ? ».
What Djakouane describes for culture holds for politics. It is through the same gestures, on the same device, that one discovers a cause, signs a petition, shares an activist video or a sequence from a parliamentary hearing. The politicisation of 15-25 year-olds passes through their cultural terminal, and it takes on its forms, expressive and collaborative, far removed from the solitary gesture of the ballot in the box. Understanding one requires understanding the other, and this is one more reason for culture professionals to feel concerned by what follows.
At the 2024 legislative elections, a youth at both poles
The snap legislative elections of June and July 2024 provide a precise photograph. In the first round, according to the Ipsos institute, 48% of the 18-24 year-olds who went to the polls voted for the Nouveau Front populaire, 33% for the Rassemblement national and its allies, and only 9% for the presidential camp. In the wake of the European elections of the same year, the Fondation Jean-Jaurès identified in a research note three underlying trends among 18-24 year-olds: an abstention that remains widespread, a vote for La France insoumise that is taking durable root, and a vote for the Rassemblement national which, without reaching the same level, grows from one election to the next. Declared closeness to the RN among under-35s rose from 10% in 2013 to 19% in 2025, according to the data gathered by Anne Muxel.
First lesson of these figures: “young people” do not exist in the singular, in politics no more than anywhere else. In the CEVIPOF survey conducted during the 2024 electoral sequence, 63% of 18-24 year-olds regarded the Rassemblement national as a threat to democracy, at the very moment when a third of their age group was voting for it. Camille Peugny has shown that social inequalities fracture youth to the point of threatening the cohesion of society as a whole; these fractures are also political. I developed in the article Rethinking youth culture what this diversity means on the side of cultural practices; the observation holds, point for point, for political orientations.
Young women to the left, young men tempted by the right
A new phenomenon runs through these fractures: young women and young men, whose votes still resembled each other twenty years ago, are now diverging. Anne Muxel devotes a chapter to this question in her note published in autumn 2025 in the “Fractures françaises” collection of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès: young women, attached to the values of equality, position themselves more often on the left, while young men take a larger part in the rightward shift observable at the ballot box.
The economists Yann Algan and Eugénie De Laubier, in a note from the CEPREMAP Observatoire du bien-être published in March 2025, propose an explanation for this divide. Young women adopt more progressive positions on immigration, minorities and gender equality, and their life satisfaction is declining, carried by a heightened awareness of discrimination since MeToo. Among young men, it is interpersonal distrust that is intensifying, and this distrust favours their shift towards more conservative values. The phenomenon extends far beyond France: researchers and analysts identify it, in varying degrees, in the United States, South Korea, Germany and the United Kingdom.
It is in this distrust among young men that the entrepreneurs of masculinism have found their market. They offer, through their content, a simple explanation for a real malaise, a community for isolated boys, and a culprit, women and equality itself. I will come back to this, because the way institutions respond to this ideological offer is part of the problem.
A rightward shift that comes from above
From these developments, many draw a diagnosis that has become commonplace, that of a youth, and a society, won over by reactionary ideas. Vincent Tiberj, in La droitisation française. Mythe et réalités (PUF, 2024), subjected this diagnosis to a meticulous empirical examination. Over the long and medium term, he shows on the basis of opinion data, French citizens have not shifted to the right; they have even become more open and more tolerant, on immigration, on social mores, on diversity, and the younger generations largely carry this evolution. The rightward shift is first of all a matter of agenda: political and media elites impose identity and security themes on public debate, and thus give the illusion that these are the French people’s primary concerns.
The paradox is resolved by abstention. The ballot boxes lean right because those who turn away from them, young people and working-class milieus first among them, leave the field to older and more conservative electorates. Tiberj speaks of a growing “electoral silence” which makes results less and less representative of real society. The lesson seems important to me for anyone who works with young people: real youth is more progressive than the image that elections and television studios reflect of it, and treating it as a reactionary bloc would be an error of diagnosis, coupled with a prophecy that could well come true by dint of being repeated.
The signs of democratic deconsolidation
There is nonetheless one point on which concern is well founded. In the summer of 2025, the YouGov institute surveyed for the TUI Foundation 6,700 Europeans aged 16 to 26, in seven countries including France: 57% hold democracy to be the best form of government, but 21% consider that an authoritarian regime would be preferable “under certain circumstances”, and 48% believe democracy to be in danger in their country. Lardeux and Tiberj, drawing on the political scientist Yascha Mounk, call “democratic deconsolidation” this weakening of the belief in democracy’s effectiveness in governing and responding to citizens’ expectations.
These figures must be read with precision. Attachment to democratic principles remains in the majority; what is eroding is trust in the capacity of current institutions to honour them. When young people are asked about their grievances, they describe decisions captured by lobbies and a public sphere to which access remains very unequal depending on one’s background. In other words, they are not asking for less democracy, but for a democracy that keeps its promises and gives them a real place in its decisions. To my mind, this deconsolidation looks far more like a disappointed demand than a renunciation.
The hearing of Alex Hitchens, an archetype
A scene from June 2025 condenses, in my eyes, everything that precedes. The commission of inquiry of the Assemblée nationale into the psychological effects of TikTok on minors hears Alex Hitchens, real name Isac Mayembo, a self-proclaimed “seduction coach”, a figure of online masculinism followed by a very large teenage and young adult audience, whose content is widely described as misogynistic. The hearing is cut short: the influencer loses his temper with the members of parliament and abruptly leaves the room, without being authorised to do so. The sequence immediately circulates on a loop across the platforms, TikTok first among them.
This scene can be read in two ways, and both readings are true at the same time. The first: masculinism is an ideological enterprise that thrives on the distrust among young men described above, and it is legitimate, it is necessary, for the national representation to investigate its effects. The second requires a detour through the psychoanalyst Alice Miller, who described in For Your Own Good (1980) “poisonous pedagogy”, that set of educational methods in which the adult imposes domination on the child while claiming to act for the child’s good. A parliamentary hearing is not a classroom, and Hitchens is not a child. But for the young audiences watching the sequence on their phones, the dramaturgy is familiar, that of the institution which summons and sanctions, without any listening seeming possible. Each camp leaves the scene comforted: the members of parliament saw in it proof that the influencer flees contradiction, while his followers saw in it proof of the institutions’ contempt for what they watch.
It is exactly in this gap that reactionary currents prosper. They offer recognition, adulterated but immediate, to those to whom institutions offer a lecture. The flaws of our democracy, which needs to be reinvented, are breaches into which the far right and masculinist movements rush, and they use them to discredit the whole of a system which nevertheless has many qualities. The answer cannot be to renounce contradiction, nor to flatter. It lies, to my mind, in a change of posture: contesting the content point by point, and at the same time treating people, adversaries included, with the dignity that democracy owes to each person. Failing which, it is the opposite demonstration that is made, before the eyes of a very large young audience.
Discoverability, the other side of the answer
A change of posture is nevertheless not enough, because scenes like this one play out in environments whose rules none of the protagonists controls. What young people discover online, masculinist content included, depends on what Emmanuel Vergès calls “invisible architectures”, the recommendation algorithms through which platforms capture attention and organise visibility according to their own interests. Vergès, cultural engineer and co-director of the Observatoire des politiques culturelles, proposes to make this a fully fledged object of cultural policy, under the name of discoverability: guaranteeing that a piece of content is available and findable amid the profusion, and therefore that the diversity of cultural, and democratic, expressions has a real chance of being encountered (Vers une politique culturelle de la découvrabilité, L’Observatoire, no. 64, July 2025). He goes so far as to propose thinking of platforms as digital public services of culture, anchored in the territories.
Vergès thus moves the debate to a place that seems right to me. As long as we discuss only content, we leave intact the architectures that decide what will be seen; we can condemn the entrepreneurs of masculinism a hundred times over, their videos will remain more discoverable than any institutional speech if nothing is undertaken on this terrain. A democracy that wants to reach its youth therefore also has to invest in the infrastructures of attention, as it knew, in other times, how to invest in libraries or public broadcasting.
A continuous progress towards respect for each person
We must leave behind the posture of the one who knows everything, and even more so the posture of imposing one’s point of view through a power authorised by force, and return to democracy. Young people are asking for justice, for respect, for recognition of their dignity, and often we do not grant them these rights because we consider that they do not respect us, and that they must be punished for it. This way of seeing is infantilising, and I analysed in the article Youth as a power relationship the mechanisms by which it manufactures the very incompetence it claims to observe.
These new relations oblige us to question ourselves, and that is rather a very good thing, for whoever does not question themselves becomes, as the saying goes, reactionary. Yet it is not at all the idea of democracy to be a reactionary system, it is even exactly the opposite. The purpose of democracy is a continuous progress towards respect for every human being. That is what it is for, and nothing else; other regimes do other things. This particular system is founded on respect for the dignity of each person in their diversity, and this requirement joins that of cultural rights, which I developed in Towards renewed cultural mediation for young people.
This respect also has a material translation. Camille Peugny observes, in Pour une politique de la jeunesse (Seuil, 2022), that France has no youth policy but an illegible “millefeuille of measures”, piled up without any overall reflection, and he argues for universal rights, an autonomy allowance or a student salary on the Danish model, which would tell young people of the trust society places in them. A democracy that leaves its youth in precariousness while asking it to adhere to its institutions cannot then be surprised by the distrust I have just described.
The foundation of a training programme
This text lays the foundation of a training programme I am preparing for people in positions of responsibility, in the cultural, educational and social fields. Understanding how today’s youth is politicised does not mean becoming demagogic or adapting to a levelling down. It means, on the contrary, taking seriously what its political stances contain that is essential, and that adults often receive as aggression when one can see in them real opportunities for common refoundation.
The working method will follow from what precedes: analysing concrete interactions together, starting with the hearing mentioned above, which is an archetype of them; welcoming the examples and questions that each participant will bring; and building, through collective intelligence, common ground. This requires probity, and constant vigilance in the face of abuses of power, of condescension, of the violence that can be exerted against those whose modes of relation are other than respect for established authority. The foundations are laid here.
