While reading The New Censorship, I kept thinking about the presidential election held earlier this year in my own country. Abelardo de la Espriella, flamboyantly far-right, dressed in the fashion of Nayib Bukele, an avid Trump supporter and former lawyer for right-wing paramilitaries, was elected Colombia’s president.
In the months leading up to the vote, Colombian media attacked, fact-checked or praised him. Even from thousands of kilometres away, my FYP could not escape him. One morning, scrolling mindlessly through Instagram, I came across a reel by his youth coalition. The person speaking was my former classmate. I kept digging, and sure enough, most of my classmates, many of whom were close friends, had liked it, reposted it or shared it to their stories. I was appalled.
I spent the day calling and texting them, getting a sense of “why?” More often than not, the answer was some version of: “I am not right-leaning; I’m just tired of the left. I am a centrist, but the centre candidate is not popular enough to win”.
And so Panievsky’s “deceptive appeal of the middle-ground” resonates deeply with this experience. De la Espriella was not originally leading the polls, but as the campaign progressed, media outlets began portraying him as one side of a symmetrical contest— that he was an equally opposing side to the old establishment. So much so that he became the only alternative in my classmate’s view.
What happened to my classmates isn’t just a Colombian anomaly. Reading about the AfD, I wonder if, for young voters in Germany, a skewed perception of the AfD’s rising popularity might swing undecided voters to the right. Political scientist Gefjon Off characterises young voters as having “looser affiliation to any particular party”, which is why platforming extremists as “surging” alternatives is so dangerous.
A recent DW report on AfD influencer tactics opens with the question: “To what extent are young people being politicized by the right? Or are they simply disillusioned with the established parties?” I think the word disillusionment carries a risk of normalising extremism just because it is “out of the norm”. It creates a false perception that just by being outsiders, they are a viable alternative to the mainstream. My classmates’ answers echos that framing. None of them told me they were choosing the far-right, “dissilussion” made sense to them as a neutral standing point that saw itself materialized in an outsider like De la Espriella.
The numbers show a divided picture. In Berlin, Left Party voters skew young: 43% of 16-24-year-olds voted for the party, and only 12% opted for the AfD. Yet a POLITICO article titled “The Far Right Is Winning. These Young Germans Show Us Why,” documents rising extremist views in the Eastern-German youth. For example, growing affiliation with Young Nationalists, the youth wing of “The Homeland,” and, perhaps most striking, 41% of 18- to 24-year-old voters backed the AfD in the infamous Saxony-Anhalt September election.
This gap shows that young voters are not destined to shift right. But it also warns us that an extreme opinion could become ordinary if the media chooses to treat it as such. Outlets risk painting outsiders as an alternative, young electorate who see themselves in the middle may start to view them as such.
