Right wing

Thursday

Yascha Mounk

The youth vote is turning right

Young people are supposed to drink a ton, have a lot of sex, hang out with their friends at every opportunity and vote for the left. Today’s young don’t live up to the stereotype. According to polls, they are one of the most responsible generations on record. Across the West, the share of young adults who binge-drink or who are sexually active has fallen to a new low. Teenagers spend far less time hanging out with their friends than their parents or grandparents did. They even seem to be defying political expectations – though their recent drift to the right has, in its own way, succeeded just as well in

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Britain is an anachronism as the world goes right

Some of us have vindictively long memories. I am one such person. So let me summon up just two stories from the not-so-distant past that have some bearing on our unhappy present. In 2009 the Dutch politician Geert Wilders was barred by Jacqui Smith, the then Labour home secretary, from entering the UK. In a letter explaining her decision, Smith (or rather her Home Office lawyers) wrote that Wilders’s ‘statements about Muslims and their beliefs would threaten community harmony and therefore public safety in the UK’. Perhaps Smith was partly influenced by the possibility that if Wilders came to the Houses of Parliament and gave his speech (in which he

Monday

Jim Lawley

Spain’s shift towards the radical right

Yesterday’s snap election in Castile-León, one of the 17 regional autonomies into which Spain is divided, was another excellent day for Vox, the most right-wing of Spain’s mainstream parties. Vox, which previously had just one seat in the 81-seat regional assembly, now has 13 and holds the balance of power. Vox’s success prevented the Partido Popular, which has governed in Castile-León for over three decades, achieving an absolute majority (41 seats or more). Instead after winning only 31 seats, the Partido Popular, Spain’s main party of the right, said it would begin discussions with all the parties. But the arithmetic suggests that in order to form a stable government the