Children bear the consequences of today’s major crises more than most, yet their concerns and experiences remain largely invisible in political life. A childist revolution calls for transforming the political space to cultivate a deeper sense of our social and natural interdependence – including fully democratising democracies through ageless suffrage. 

This article is part of the Green European Journal’s upcoming print edition on demographic futures, out in early June. Subscribe now and get it delivered straight to your door.

Democracies face crises when populations lose confidence in their ability to address fundamental concerns – as is usually the case in periods of rapid industrialisation, runaway inequality, economic depression, mass migration, and war. During such times, they often backslide into authoritarian appeals, but tend eventually to evolve new democratic norms and practices. 

The worldwide crisis of democracy today revolves around issues that centrally concern one of the most disempowered social groups: the third of humanity who are children. It is children above all who face the greatest impacts of climate change, both immediately and in the long term. Children in rich and poor countries alike suffer disproportionate poverty because of global neoliberalism. Young people die in outsized numbers from civilian-targeted modern warfare and terrorism. And they are hit hardest by the ways that new digital technologies manipulate information and foster technological addiction. 

However, children remain largely invisible in political life. Indeed, it is this very invisibility that keeps children’s issues at the margins of democratic policymaking.  

The rise of childism 

The past couple of decades have seen the rise of a movement among academics and activists to respond to these democratic and childhood realities under the umbrella of childism. Childism is a critical approach to societies similar to feminism, anti-racism, decolonialism, and the like. It seeks to empower children and acknowledge their concerns and experiences by transforming historically ingrained assumptions and structures. Its aim is to reconstruct social norms to make them genuinely age-inclusive. 

The word “childism” was coined in the early 2000s in academic literature rooted in the then-emerging field of childhood studies, which seeks to understand children’s agency and experiences as children rather than as developing adults. In the 1990s, the term was used briefly in literary studies to refer to a practice of reading like a child. More recently, it has also been used in a negative sense, akin to sexism and racism. But the predominant meaning in scholarship – and now also in social activism – is in its positive sense of children’s empowerment. 

The central problem that childism addresses is a deeply rooted adultism: the assumption that the adult is the measure of the human. Adultism is the often forgotten side of patriarchy, the historical power of the “pater” or father, which is not only gendered but also aged. Like sexism, adultism is deeply embedded in our histories, cultures, and languages. Adultism in particular asserts a binary opposition between supposedly rational and independent adults on the one hand, and supposedly irrational and dependent children on the other. In this way, it divides social relations in everything from families and communities to human rights and law. 

 Adultism is the often forgotten side of patriarchy, the historical power of the “pater” or father, which is not only gendered but also aged.

Children themselves are already practising an implicit childism. Young climate protesters are demanding age inclusivity in environmental policy. Child labour union activists are calling for recognition for non-adult work. Youth are fighting for schools free of gun violence. Transgender children are pushing their communities to change how they think about gender identity. Children and youth in the dozens of countries with child and youth parliaments are pressing for children’s perspectives on safe streets, access for people with disabilities, and education reform. 

Children’s suffrage 

As marginalised groups over history have found, however, the ultimate right to political inclusion is the right to vote. Suffrage does not solve all problems, but it does confer on those possessing it the status of first-class citizens with equal political dignity. It is the right to participate in the process of forming rights. This is why non-landowners, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and women fought so hard to achieve it. And it is why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights call, without any type of qualification, for “universal and equal suffrage”.  

Children have been fighting for suffrage since at least the 1990s. They have done so in campaigns and legal action by groups like We Want the Vote and KRÄTZÄ in Germany, the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) in the US, Young Pirates of Europe (YPE), and Green Youth. Adults have joined them with academic and policy support, including through initiatives like the Children’s Voting Colloquium, Amnesty International UK, the Freechild Institute, the National Association of Large Families , and the Child Rights International Network (CRIN). What is more, children and adults have sued governments for ageless suffrage in Germany, California and Massachusetts in the United States, Sweden, and Canada.

The childist argument for ageless suffrage is that it is necessary for the wellbeing of both children and democracies. Children themselves would finally have their lives and perspectives taken just as seriously by policymakers, whose jobs would no longer rely solely on pressure from adults. And democracies would benefit from the full range of the people’s ideas, thus making better-informed decisions. 

A matter of competence?  

The main objection to children’s suffrage has historically been that children lack voting competence. People under the age of maturity are thought to be deficient in democratic thinking skills, knowledge, and independence, and to be too open to manipulation. And they are presumed to lack the experience and understanding needed to contribute to difficult decisions about complex political matters like war, health policy, and immigration. 

But these presumptions misunderstand both democracy and childhood. Working backwards from the aims of democracy, voting competence consists in the ability to give voice to political views. The purpose of democratic voting is not to place decisions in the hands of those with certain types of knowledge, but to hold elected representatives accountable to the people impacted by their decisions. Anyone should be included in the vote who wishes to have a say in what policymakers may do. 

Barring children from voting is, in reality, a form of systemic discrimination. It holds them to a standard of voting competence that is not applied to the rest of the population.

If voting competence is properly understood, children have much more of it – and adults much less – than commonly thought. It is hard to deny democratic capacities to the millions of children who march for climate change policies, fight against racism, or participate in children’s parliaments, child labour unions, or any number of other political organisations. Children worldwide discuss politics at the dinner table, read or watch the news, and hold diverse opinions about current events. There is no magical stage of neurological development at which the capacity to have political views suddenly arises. It is a general capacity of anyone aware of their larger world. 

This capacity of children to participate in democratic life is already legally recognised in Articles 12, 13, and 15 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. These guarantee children the rights to “express [their] views freely in all matters affecting the child”, “freedom of expression” without unnecessary restriction, and “freedom of association”. All of these rights are violated when children are banned from exercising their democratic capacities. 

Likewise, adults exhibit very wide ranges of democratic skill, knowledge, and susceptibility to influence. Adults have the right to vote regardless of ignorance, thoughtlessness, and openness to manipulation. They retain this right even if they suffer from severe cognitive impairment, mental disability, or dementia. History shows that adults frequently make terrible voting decisions. Furthermore, no adult has a deep understanding of all the matters they must vote upon, from economic statistics to military capacities, health innovations, top secret information, legal precedents, and much else. 

Barring children from voting is, in reality, a form of systemic discrimination. It holds them to a standard of voting competence that is not applied to the rest of the population. The European Court of Human Rights defines discrimination as “differential treatment in comparable situations without an objective or reasonable justification”. Adult-only voting excludes children as a class of citizens for reasons outside the objective requirements of voting itself. 

Stronger democracies 

But the most important reason to give children the right to vote is that it would improve life for children and adults and strengthen democracies.  

Children themselves would live in political environments that are required to take their interests into account centrally instead of peripherally. Currently, they cannot vote politicians out of office, which means authorities are not truly incentivised to take children’s experiences and concerns seriously. Children may be objects of democratic beneficence, but like adults, they also need to be treated as subjects with democratic agency.  

If children could vote, they would likely pressure politicians, for example, to finally take the climate emergency seriously, fight child poverty, regulate digital media, invest in meaningful education reform, attend to lifelong healthcare, and create safer streets and greener spaces. They would also have greater recourse to fight social discrimination, such as social media bans, age curfews, exclusion from divorce proceedings, corporal punishment, school discipline, issues with access to medical care, and much more. 

Granting children the right to vote would also benefit adults. Everyone would gain from better climate policies. Parents would be helped by children’s greater economic support. Teachers would be empowered by education policies that better respond to children’s actual lives and experiences. Doctors would find greater resources for child healthcare and research. And business leaders would hire from a better-educated workforce.  

Moreover, democracy itself would be strengthened by becoming more fully responsive to the people’s actual lives. Policymakers would find themselves equally beholden to all instead of just some of their constituents. Democratic leaders could make clearer decisions with – so to speak – a third more pixels added to their policymaking screen. And democracies would make choices about war, spending, and judicial reform in more inclusively informed ways. 

What is more, children’s suffrage could provide the needed antidote to today’s slide of democracies into authoritarianism. The right to vote for all would undercut the assumption that some are natural rulers over others. And it would eliminate the problem of citizens spending the first quarter of their lives being told that their views do not count, which opens citizens to simplistic authoritarian appeals. Instead of looking to father figures, democracies would more likely turn to broad-minded defenders of human rights. 

Children may be objects of democratic beneficence, but like adults, they also need to be treated as subjects with democratic agency.  

Systemic inclusion 

Childism calls for not only new understandings of voting rights but also new electoral practices. Suffrage movements typically shift how voting actually takes place. We have come a long way from landowning men choosing representatives in taverns.  

A good first step is to lower the voting age. In countries that have lowered the national voting age to 16, children have been shown to turn out in higher numbers for elections than young adults and to retain higher voting rates into adulthood. They have also moved policymakers to include more child-friendly interests. However, from a childist perspective, lowering voting ages does not go far enough. It still only enfranchises children who are thought to have achieved adult-like competencies, whereas genuine democracies need to move beyond adultism. 

There are several different proposals for ageless voting rights, but my own is for what I call proxy-claim voting. Under this proposition, all citizens would have a proxy vote from birth to death, which can be used by their legal guardian – a parent, caretaker, or next of kin. This proxy vote would most likely be used on behalf of infants, young children, cognitively impaired children and adults, adults with significant disabilities or health issues, and elderly persons with dementia. But all citizens would, at the same time, have the right to claim the exercise of their vote on their own behalf. Whenever a citizen desired to vote independently, regardless of their age or condition, they could claim their right to do so. 

Some might object that a proxy-claim right to vote would advantage larger families, but in reality, it would advantage the children themselves in these families who deserve their own equal representation. Others might find proxy voting fundamentally undemocratic, yet it already exists in most countries for impaired (or even just travelling) adults, so why not also for the youngest children? Some do not think voting is all that powerful anyway, but is it fair or just to ban one group even from the choice to participate? 

Childism calls for children’s systemic inclusion and empowerment. It suggests, just like first-wave feminism, that the right to vote is a fundamental human right. But suffrage is only a first step. Childism sets in motion a systemic critique of societies’ adultistic biases across law, policy, culture, and family. It insists that children are not second-class citizens but central to infusing societies with humanity. 

Since coming to power in 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative government has overseen an illiberal turn, largely unchallenged by a divided opposition and a compliant mainstream media. Civil society organisations have stepped up to fill that gap – but at considerable cost. Whether they can sustain that role will depend on stronger public participation and structural support. 

For many Europeans, democratic backsliding is no longer something that happens elsewhere. In V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2026, five European countries – Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the UK – have been added to the list of autocratisers. Greece, on the other hand, has been on this list for several years: its episode of democratic decline, ranking seventh globally in terms of the magnitude of democratic deterioration, began in 2020. The country remains an electoral democracy, but it has lost its status as a liberal democracy, and its trajectory has been consistently downward. 

While Greece’s democratic decline is clearly part of a larger wave, what makes it distinctive is the speed and the method with which it’s unfolding. The fact that it’s happening inside the European Union, in a country that had, within living memory, emerged from a military dictatorship, makes it particularly concerning. 

Democratically unravelling a democracy  

In July 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his centre-right party Nea Dimokratia (“New Democracy”) won a strong parliamentary majority and unseated left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who had been in power since 2015. Among the first pieces of legislation the new government passed was the so-called Executive State (“Εpiteliko Κratos”), which placed the National Intelligence Service, the EYP, under the direct control of the Prime Minister’s Office. Political oversight of the EYP was handed to the PM’s Secretary General and nephew, Grigoris Dimitriadis. At the same time, the government quietly amended the qualification requirements for the head of the EYP, removing the prerequisite of holding a university degree – a change widely seen as tailor-made to allow the appointment of Panagiotis Kontoleon.  

Meanwhile, the public broadcaster ERT, along with the national press agency AMNA, was also brought under tighter government control, while independent auditing bodies, such as the General Inspector of Public Administration, were disbanded.  

None of this was hidden. It was done through legislation, in plain sight, with an outright parliamentary majority that made institutional opposition powerless. The mainstream media, owned by a handful of oligarchs with conspicuous ties to the ruling party, looked the other way. 

The Covid-19 pandemic handed the government another opportunity to centralise power. The distribution of public health state advertising funds to media outlets through a scheme that became known as the “Petsas list” made visible a system of government influence over the media that had until then been less openly discussed. Public money was flowing to outlets that were sympathetic to the government; outlets that were critical received disproportionately smaller amounts and in some cases nothing at all. No law was broken, but the effect on a media landscape, already strained by the economic crisis, was significant. 

Then came a spying scandal. In 2022, it emerged that a powerful spyware called Predator had been used to monitor opposition politicians, journalists, senior military figures, and even government ministers. The Hellenic Data Protection Authority (DPA) eventually confirmed that at least 87 individuals had been illegally targeted with this spyware, and 27 of them had also been simultaneously monitored by the EYP through legal channels. Dimitriadis resigned, and so did the head of the EYP, but Mitsotakis denied knowledge. Two prosecutors who had been tasked with investigating the case were removed from it after submitting a second formal request for information to the DPA. In February 2026, four executives involved in supplying Predator were convicted in connection with the scandal. No government official has been charged to this day. 

The Predator affair was not simply a surveillance scandal, but a stress test that revealed the full architecture of a system in construction since 2019: an intelligence service with no meaningful independence from the executive, a media landscape too compromised to perform serious scrutiny, a parliamentary majority capable of rewriting inconvenient rules on short notice, and a justice system whose handling of these and other landmark cases left open questions that remain, to date, publicly unanswered.  

In February 2024, the European Parliament adopted its first-ever resolution on Greece, citing grave concerns about threats to democracy, the rule of law, and fundamental rights. That it took EU institutions five years and a major spying scandal to react tells its own story about the limits of European oversight. 

By then, the question was no longer whether Greek democracy was under pressure – that much was settled – but who, if anyone, was actually doing the work of accountability that formal institutions had either abandoned or been stripped of the capacity to perform. 

The state pushes back 

History has taught that governments that capture institutions rarely stop there. Once the formal mechanisms of oversight have been hollowed out, the next target is whoever has taken up the slack. Greece has been no exception: as a small ecosystem of civil society organisations (CSOs) and independent journalists grew more visible and more effective at holding power to account, the state responded by exerting pressure to make their work as difficult as possible. 

Some of that pressure has worn the face of bureaucratic procedure. The NGO registry created in 2020 by the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, presented as a transparency measure, became in practice an instrument of selective exclusion. Refugee Support Aegean, one of the most established legal aid organisations working with refugees and asylum seekers in the country, was denied registration despite meeting all legal requirements, on the stated grounds that providing support to persons facing deportation orders contradicted Greek law. Even though the right to legal representation for persons facing deportation is enshrined in Greek, EU, and international law, the rejection stood. It was overturned before the Council of State. Whether intended or not, the message to other organisations operating in the same space was clear. 

In early 2026, the Migration Ministry pushed further still, passing amendments to the Migration Code that elevated routine humanitarian work – such as providing food, shelter, or assistance to migrants – to a serious criminal offence. Membership of a registered NGO is now considered an aggravating circumstance. The proposals were introduced days after 24 humanitarian workers in Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, had been acquitted of charges they had spent eight years fighting. Five years of formal recommendations from the EU, the Council of Europe, and the UN, all calling on Greece to lift arbitrary restrictions on civil society in the migration field, had apparently registered as a reason to accelerate, not reverse, the squeeze. 

Legal intimidation has reached well beyond the migration sector. When journalists at Reporters United and Efimerida ton Syntakton published their investigations into the Predator scandal, and specifically the role played by Grigoris Dimitriadis as the one who held political oversight of the EYP, the response came on the same day as Dimitriadis’s resignation: a lawsuit demanding close to one million euros in damages from the journalists and their outlets. International press freedom bodies were unambiguous in their characterisation of the action as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP), aimed not at winning in court but at putting economic strain, stress, and uncertainty on independent media. In 2025, after years of proceedings, an Athens court dismissed the case entirely, ruling the reporting accurate and finding nothing defamatory in any of the articles. 

Once the formal mechanisms of oversight have been hollowed out, the next target is whoever has taken up the slack.

The more insidious form of pressure has been reputational. In early 2026, Vouliwatch (a democracy watchdog organisation I co-founded) and the investigative outlet Solomon published the “Consultocracy Report”, a systematic study of the Greek public administration’s use of private consultancy services, built entirely from official public procurement data. The findings were concerning: a dramatic rise in contracts, the majority of which were awarded without competitive tendering, and documented cases of private consultancy firms involved in drafting legislation. The government chose not to engage with the report. Instead, at an official press briefing, government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis made false claims about the report’s methodology and insinuated, also falsely, that Vouliwatch was politically motivated and funded by the European Left.  

Publicly discrediting CSOs and journalists who challenge the dominant narrative, question policies, and shed light on political scandals has been a recurrent tactic of the Mitsotakis government over the past years. The prime minister himself has publicly attacked journalists during speeches in parliament and press briefings, while ministers have repeatedly questioned the integrity of well-established international organisations such as Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International. 

Taken individually, each of these tactics – registry exclusions, criminal law amendments, SLAPP litigation, public smear campaigns – might be dismissed as isolated incidents of overreach. Taken together, they point to something more deliberate: an environment in which accountability work is made increasingly costly, legally fraught, professionally risky, and personally draining. The goal of all this is not necessarily to destroy the organisations in question, but to ensure that the cost of scrutiny is high enough to deter the next investigation, the next campaign, the next report that asks uncomfortable questions. 

Civil society on the front line 

Against this backdrop of chronic underfunding, legal harassment, and coordinated public delegitimisation, something unexpected has happened: the civil society ecosystem has held and, in some respects, even grown. 

This is not a given. Greek civil society as we know it today is young. Much of it emerged directly from the wreckage of the financial crisis, built by people who watched the formal political system fail catastrophically and decided, for various reasons, to try a different approach. These organisations were never well-resourced. They have always been viewed with suspicion rather than respect: in Greece, the concept of an independent, non-partisan civic sector sits uncomfortably against a political culture in which virtually every collective endeavour has traditionally been understood through a partisan lens.  

State funding is either unavailable or comes with obvious strings attached. Domestic philanthropy remains thin, while international foundations rarely take notice of Greece. The EU project funding that sustains much of the sector is a lifeline but comes at a heavy cost: it requires staff to spend significant proportions of their time on compliance bureaucracy and deliverables that, more often than not, have little to do with the purpose that brought them into the sector in the first place. 

What Greek CSOs have achieved despite these constraints is worth taking seriously. In the years since democratic backsliding accelerated, together with independent journalism outlets, CSOs have fulfilled a role that formal democratic institutions have been either unwilling or unable to perform. They have monitored government practices, pursued freedom of information requests that ministries ignored, and taken legal action when they were ignored. They produced investigative work on the Predator scandal, on the Petsas list, on the concentration of media ownership, on procurement irregularities, on pushbacks at sea – work that was subsequently picked up by European institutions, informing  resolutions, rule of law reports, and parliamentary inquiries.  

They have reported Greece’s situation to EU bodies not because they expected immediate countermeasures, but because building a documented, evidenced record of what is happening counts as accountability work in a context where domestic channels are blocked. The personal cost of this work has been real and is not discussed enough. Staff in these organisations are, with very few exceptions, overworked and underpaid. They have been targets of coordinated social media harassment. Some have faced SLAPP litigation that drags on for years, even when it ultimately fails. Many have been named in government press briefings, dismissed by ministers, characterised as foreign agents or partisan operatives in oligarch-owned media. Operating under these conditions requires a particular kind of stubbornness that should not be romanticised. Burnout is endemic, and the sector is bound to lose good people and repel new entrants as these adverse conditions persist.  

Authoritarian tendencies do not consolidate only by weakening organisations; they consolidate when societies become convinced that collective action is futile.

Unfinished business 

What has changed – and this may be the most significant development of recent years – is that these organisations have started to work together. In the Greek context, such collaboration is harder than it sounds: fragmentation and competitive individualism are deeply rooted cultural tendencies that civil society has reproduced faithfully. The reflex to guard organisational territory, to duplicate rather than collaborate, to approach partnership with wariness: while these barriers are not unique to Greece, they have been particularly pronounced here.  

But something has shifted. Joint investigations, shared advocacy campaigns, coordinated submissions to European institutions, and co-signed public statements have become the norm. Through this cooperation, a closely knit community has formed, held together not by formal structure but by a shared understanding of what is at stake and, frankly, by the practical recognition that no single organisation is large enough to do this work alone. 

Importantly, this collaboration has not remained entirely confined to the civic sector. The work of CSOs has resonated with broader segments of society, particularly younger people who have grown up amid overlapping crises and whose trust in political institutions is often fragile or absent altogether. For many, these initiatives increasingly function less as traditional civil society and more as visible demonstrations that public participation, democratic accountability, and the defence of rights are not abstract ideals delegated to institutions, but collective responsibilities that citizens themselves can exercise. 

That may ultimately prove to be the decisive terrain. Authoritarian tendencies do not consolidate only by weakening organisations; they consolidate when societies become convinced that collective action is futile. In that sense, it could be argued that the state’s various harassment strategies are aimed not only at exhausting individual organisations, but at fracturing the fragile sense of civic possibility that has begun to emerge around them. So far, they have not succeeded. 

Greece’s civic sector has demonstrated, under pressure, that it is capable of doing things that matter. What is still lacking is the structural backing that would allow it to do those things sustainably, without relying indefinitely on individuals’ willingness to absorb costs that institutions should not be asking them to bear.  

That is the unfinished business. And it’s a European question as much as a Greek one. 

The 7 May elections in the UK have added further proof to the pile of evidence that suggests Westminster’s two-party system is a thing of the past. Where Labour and the Conservatives languished, the Greens and Reform saw their vote shares soar. But the elections also point to another, less discussed shift: the growing support for independence among the Union’s smaller members.

Edinburgh is a city of tenements. Where urban England is generally built from winding rows of terraced houses, each with their own front door, we Scots are more often stacked in blocks of low-rise flats. The streets of our metropolitan centres are lined by four-to-five-storey façades with symmetrical rows of living-room and kitchen windows.

Wandering through those streets in recent weeks – in central Edinburgh or Glasgow – a particular flash of colour would repeatedly catch the eye: a lurid green, standing out against the soft sandstone shades which characterise these buildings. And looking closely, you would have seen words written across them in bold black ink: “Vote Green”.

At the previous Scottish Parliament election, in 2021, the Scottish Green Party (which is independent from but friendly with the one Zack Polanski leads in England and Wales) got 8.1 per cent of the vote and eight seats – a record result. On 7 May this year, the Greens got 14 per cent, and 15 of the 129 members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs). They won only two fewer MSPs than Labour and the far-right Reform, which came second equal, and finished ahead of both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

As well as winning a record number of seats, mostly through the proportional “list” system, the Scottish Greens won their first ever constituencies. They got the most votes in Edinburgh Central, where they unseated a prominent minister of the Scottish National Party (SNP), and in Glasgow Southside, which was previously represented by former first minister Nicola Sturgeon (she decided not to run this time).

A block of flats in Glasgow’s Waverley Street, with Vote Green posters in multiple windows. May 2026. Credit: ©John Smith

Scotland wants out

This exceptional result for the Greens was matched by another extraordinary success. The SNP – a centre-left party which supports independence and a return to the EU, and, before Brexit, sat alongside the Green group in the European Parliament as part of the European Free Alliance – won 58 seats, and so a fifth consecutive term in government.

The SNP’s critics point out that turnout was down, enthusiasm has waned, and the party looks tired and out of ideas as it limps towards its third decade in power. These things are all true: the SNP’s constituency vote fell from nearly 1.3 million in 2021 to less than 900,000 this time. But it’s also true that it has achieved an astonishing run of victories since 2007, despite broad opposition from the press and the British establishment. These results are all the more impressive since, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, this isn’t exactly an era when incumbency has been an electoral advantage. The SNP is, surely, the most successful centre-left party in Europe this century.

The relationship between the Greens and the SNP is generally as convivial as two groups of competing politicians can be. For much of the SNP’s time in power, it has been a minority government, often relying on Green votes to pass budgets. The Green complaint about the SNP isn’t usually that it is taking the country in the wrong direction, but that it is ambling in the right direction far too slowly, and is too often nudged off course by powerful vested interests. Scottish voters get two ballot papers – one for their local constituency MSP, and one for a proportional regional list. Greens don’t run in many constituencies, and their voters usually lend support to the SNP on that ballot.

Perhaps most significantly, both parties support Scottish independence and a return to the EU. Together, at this election, they won the biggest pro-independence majority in Scotland’s history, and so a clear mandate for a referendum. Should such a vote take place, most recent polls suggest a narrow victory for Yes, with the overwhelming majority of younger voters supporting independence. As it has been for a decade now, this generational divide is remarkable. One recent poll by the agency Survation (which predicted the recent election most accurately) showed that around two-thirds of Scots under 35 support independence, with only 20 per cent saying they would vote No, and the rest undecided. The majority persisted through the 45-55 age bracket, where Yes support was at 55 per cent, compared to 33 per cent opposing independence. However, only 40 per cent of those aged between 55 and 65 supported independence, and two-thirds of Scots over 65 wanted to stay in the Union.

Most worryingly for supporters of the Union, there is now strong evidence that this split is about generation rather than age. In other words, as younger voters have got older, they have continued to support independence. Millennial support for independence hasn’t dropped off as we’ve become parents and got mortgages – it’s embedded.

Securing such a referendum legally, however, requires the consent of the UK government, which it has so far refused to give since Scotland’s last independence vote in 2014. In Britain’s ancient and uncodified constitution, Westminster ultimately has absolute authority to legislate as it pleases, and no prime minister wants to be the one to have lost Scotland.

The whispers of separation

Still, as John Swinney – the re-elected first minister – argues for a new referendum, he will have some new, powerful allies. Wales held an election to its parliament – the Senedd – on the same day as Scotland. The result there was even more extraordinary: Labour had won every major election in the country for more than a century. But it was thrashed by the SNP’s sister party, Plaid Cymru, which came first with 43 of 96 seats. The far-right Reform, which had hopes of coming first, got second place with 34 seats, while Labour was reduced to nine. The Greens, who had never had a member of the Senedd before, managed to break through and win two – a remarkable achievement given that many progressive voters scrambled to back Plaid Cymru at the last minute, for fear of Reform coming first.

As in Scotland, both Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Greens support Welsh independence. Likewise, in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin, which supports Northern Ireland leaving the UK to unite with the rest of Ireland, is now the largest party. First minister Michelle O’Neill has been quick to align with the Scottish and Welsh independence movements. While the Good Friday Agreement peace deal – which ended the civil war known euphemistically as “The Troubles” in 1998 – requires that parties from each side of Northern Ireland’s old constitutional and cultural divide share political power, O’Neill’s election in 2024 marked the first time ever that the resultant government has been led by a first minister who supports leaving the UK and joining Ireland.

Though there isn’t yet majority support for either Welsh independence or Irish unity, polls show rapid growth in favour of separating from the UK over the decade since the Brexit referendum. Majorities of young people in both places are consistently in favour, and a desire to leave the UK is now the standard position on the Left in both Northern Ireland and Wales.

Notably, support for independence is not limited to the three smaller countries in the Union. The Green Party of England and Wales has long supported the constitutional aspirations of its northern sister party, and been in favour of Welsh independence since 2020 (I am told that the Welsh Greens becoming their own party is now a matter of “when, not if”). When I interviewed English Green leader Zack Polanski about independence last year, he was an enthusiastic supporter.

The astonishing rise of the English Greens under Polanski has been well documented, and the 7 May English local elections were another profound milestone for the party. The Greens came second to Reform in the national vote share, winning hundreds of new local councillors and securing their first two elected mayors.

What  has  been less discussed is that this result means England now has a large and powerful party which supports the break-up of the UK. The very fact that this isn’t headline news is, in itself, remarkable. Over the last few months, Labour, Reform, and the UK’s famously right-wing press have attacked Greens on almost every plausible subject. The party’s positions on drugs, sex work, Palestine, and peace have been twisted into moral panics smeared across endless front pages of oligarch-owned newspapers. Yet there’s barely been a word about the fact that the Greens back the Break-up of Britain – presumably because these opponents know that most voters in England are, at most, ambivalent about the subject.

Resisting Reform

Just as significant for the UK’s future is the rise of Reform. While the far-right party finished in second place in Scotland (with Labour) and Wales, it came first in England. Like many of its counterparts across Europe, Reform doesn’t exactly have a coherent programme. But one thing which is clear is that it is a loud proponent of what I would call Anglo-British nationalism: the party has openly flirted with the idea of shutting the Welsh parliament, and has proposed reducing the size and power of the Scottish parliament, imposing more direct rule from Westminster. In England, Reform is aligned with the racist movements which have been tying English flags to lampposts across the country as part of a wider anti-immigration backlash. A fandom for Britain’s colonialist past, the party is obsessed with the old imperial institutions of the British state.

For many in Scotland, the desire for independence is bound up with the fear of being governed by that sort of right-wing, Anglo-British nationalism. Shortly after his re-election as first minister, John Swinney sought to tap into that concern, saying that Scotland must achieve independence before Reform leader Nigel Farage likely becomes British prime minister at the next UK general election.

In Scotland, many people feel that the country is trapped. Supporters of independence feel stuck in a Union they want to leave, and which they can see is careering towards a far-right government Scotland is very unlikely to have voted for (every single local authority area in the country opposed Brexit in 2016, and Reform didn’t win a single constituency in this Scottish parliament election, implying they may fail to win any MPs at the next UK general election). For these people, there is a lingering, as-yet unanswered question: what is the mechanism for Scotland to leave the UK, should most Scots want to do so? Under the Good Friday Agreement, UK government ministers are required to hold a referendum on Irish unity if they have reason to believe it would pass. Scotland, however, has no such exit route.

On the other hand, for opponents of independence, there is a parallel frustration at being trapped in what they see as an endless, pointless conversation about our constitutional future.

A broken system

It’s not clear what the escape route from this trap might be. But one thing is obvious: this is only one part of a much larger constitutional crisis in the UK. The rise of both the Greens and Reform renders the first-past-the-post electoral system used at Westminster obsolete. The system, whereby the candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins the election regardless of whether this produces nationally proportional results, can’t possibly express voters’ views sensibly. Worse still for the Scots and Welsh, over the last two hundred years,  first-past-the-post has disproportionately delivered Conservative governments for which we haven’t voted.

 At the same time, the monarchy – long the ideological guardrail for the Westminster system – has been bruised both by the death of Elizabeth II and by the revelations about her son Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The default pro-Americanism of British foreign policy has been profoundly damaged by Trump; and millions have turned against it because of British complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza. 

While faith in representative structures has corroded across the Western world, polls consistently put Britain towards the very bottom of international rankings for trust in our politics. This isn’t surprising: Britain doesn’t have a “normal” political set-up. Where almost every other European country had a revolution or independence moment at some point, after which people gathered and wrote a constitution, Britain has a medieval system with multiple democratic features retrofitted. We have one of the most centralised systems of state power in the Western world, with almost all major decisions made at the core (particularly in England). Despite its theoretical sovereignty, our parliament has remarkably little capacity to hold that core to account. And, with the House of Lords’ entrenching cronyism, the inadequacy of the first-past-the-post system, the power of millionaire- and corporate-funded cliques, and tight control of our traditional parties through the whipping system, voters have surprisingly little influence over who sits in our parliament and what our government does, leaving a flood of corporate cash to shape the policies of our state.

In the past, British voters were willing to accept a relatively less democratic state than our European neighbours, because its imperialism delivered us all (to differing degrees) the wealth which came from the plunder of empire. Now, with the empire gone, the British state staggers from crisis to crisis, and voters feel little sense that we even have control over the direction of the staggering. Inequality is rampant, the economy is – for all but the hyper-rich – stagnant. The centres of towns across the UK are rotting.

Ultimately, it is this dysfunctionality of the Westminster system which drives the desire to leave the UK, and that problem isn’t about to be resolved. There may not be any obvious mechanism for Scotland to get its referendum, but the pressure to allow one isn’t going anywhere. And with the real risk of a Faragist government on the horizon, the demands will become increasingly desperate.

Walk through those streets in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and look up at those flats. The majority of people who live in them don’t want to live under Westminster rule, and are eager to return to the EU. How will that desire express itself over the next five years? The answer to that question could have profound implications for British – and European – politics.

Built on the assumption that price is the best measure of value, modern economics has never adequately grasped non-transactional exchange – care relationships and reproductive work above all. Declining birth rates and ageing societies are now laying bare the limits of a framework that feminist thinkers have long critiqued. An interview with economist Emma Holten.

This article is part of the Green European Journal’s upcoming print edition on demographic futures, out in early June. Subscribe now and get it delivered straight to your door.

Green European Journal: The history of modern political theory is marked by a major omission – of bodies, their needs, and the necessity of caring for them. How did this omission come about?  

Emma Holten: Enlightenment thinking was very much about liberating the individual – from hierarchy, from the ties of religion and superstition, from the bounds of class. Thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, for example, were very progressive in their belief that the individual has value in and of itself. That conviction became the building block of modern political theory, and it has been hugely important for feminism, too. However, it overlooked that individuals are connected not only in oppressive systems but also in positive relationships. Human beings exist only in the context of other human beings. But that interdependence disappeared.  

This omission was most striking in the context of birth and family relationships. The whole story of what it takes to give birth and raise an individual completely disappeared, and we started making political theory about well-educated adults, as if they sprang up like mushrooms. 

How did this original sin become so entrenched in modern economics? 

Economics, too, had a noble ambition: to provide a clear description of the political system and to be able to quantify it. In the 1870s, this ambition culminated in the marginalist revolution, which was probably the most influential shift in the history of economics. Marginalism is based on the idea that you can use market prices to establish value. According to this theory, the market-clearing price is the perfect balance between supply and demand, between how much one wants to be paid for a product or service and how much someone else is willing to pay for it.  

Many of us grow up thinking that economics is like physics or chemistry […] We don’t question it because it would feel like questioning gravity.

The obvious corollary is that if something doesn’t have a price, it doesn’t have value. Economics loses the ability to speak about things that don’t have a price, such as time spent with friends or in the home. The only way to measure the value of time spent at home caring for others or being cared for by others is to calculate how much you would make if you used that time in the market instead.  

However, I don’t think price is a good measure of value in the market either. I spend a lot of time talking to nurses, caregivers for elderly people, and social workers, and when I tell them that economics measures their value by their salary, they are either shocked or start laughing. When you receive care, you don’t necessarily know what the value of that interaction is going to be; it only becomes visible in the long term. And if this interaction happens in the public sector, then the market is all the more unable to grasp its value. Economic methods find it much easier to understand the value of a car than the value of care, both paid and unpaid.  

 Why is this way of thinking about value so difficult to dispel?  

Many of us grow up thinking that economics is like physics or chemistry. That it has always been the same, and we’ve always looked at value the same way. And this is a huge part of economics’ power. We don’t question it, because it would feel like questioning gravity. American economist Paul Samuelson famously said that he didn’t care who held political office as long as he got to write economics textbooks. Economics conditions the way we think about politics.  

The rise of Thatcherism, of neoliberalism – the idea that the market comes before the state, and that the state’s responsibility is to take care of the market, not the people – has reinforced this influence. We let economists decide how much we should work, how much time parents should be able to spend with their children, what the optimal way to provide childcare is, or how to take care of nature. But these are fundamentally political questions. Their depoliticisation has exacerbated the dynamic whereby things that economics can value tend to be overvalued, while those it cannot value become completely valueless. 

Dominant theories may be unable to account for the value of care in the economy, yet they assume a steady and abundant supply of care to sustain the economic system. How do you make sense of this paradox?  

This is probably the central paradox in how modern economics deals with care. It has the idea that people are rational agents, act in their own self-interest, and are oriented towards the market. And so the provision of care, which largely falls outside the market, remains a blind spot. Economic theories tend to assume an endless supply of care, without a clear theory of how it is sustained.  

Based on their own reasoning, women would never have children because it is completely irrational from a market perspective. Yet when birth rates decline, suddenly shock ensues. I sometimes wonder whether economists are angrier at women when they have children or when they don’t. If they do have children and need to work part-time, that’s expensive and doesn’t create enough value. But if they don’t have children, that suddenly becomes a huge issue for the economy.  

When you study economics, the first thing you learn is the production function. How does a product come to be? In that function, there’s a variable called “L”. That’s labour power. But there is no acknowledgement of where it comes from; it’s just there. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the poverty of the theories. 

 I sometimes wonder whether economists are angrier at women when they have children or when they don’t. 

Feminist thinkers have challenged the approach that treats care as entirely outside the economic equation, but they haven’t always agreed on how best to make the case for it.  

Feminist theorists, particularly Italian feminists like Silvia Federici, have been instrumental in showing that the undervaluing of care is a central part of capitalism. This applies to paid and unpaid care, to the public and the private sector alike.  

The big question was: to price or not to price? Should we speak the devil’s language? Some feminist economists, especially in the early days of the field, argued that we should price unpaid care so we can include it in GDP and measure it. This was based on the reasoning that we can’t change the system, and so we need to use its language and its rules in our favour.  

We’ve seen a similar logic at play in the environmental movement, where putting a price on a tree or a marsh seems to be the best way to protect it. But pricing ignores the relationships; it isolates and splits things up. And when you talk about nature, you cannot isolate and split. The same goes for care. The value of a mother, just like that of a tree, is not visible at the time of the exchange; it is long-term, and it is reciprocal: mother and child are changing one another. You cannot say that one is giving something to another, as if it were a simple transaction.  

 The home, in particular, has been a subject of controversy within feminist thought. Is it a prison or a shelter, a site of oppression and exploitation or one of liberation? 

It is both. Historically, the home has been a site of extreme violence against women, and we can understand why so much of feminist thought was focused on getting women out of the home and getting them to make their own money. The dominant type of feminism, middle-class feminism, places a strong emphasis on achieving workplace equality between women and men. You can see this in EU strategies for gender equality, for example. That’s what takes up all the space. But many women, especially lower-class or migrant women who face exploitation, are actually fighting to get into the home, to have enough money to see their own children, to have time to rest. This is the double vision we need when we deal with care. The fight goes both ways. And for many people, home is also a place of liberation. 

Meanwhile, we haven’t made a big enough effort to get men into the home. Sometimes, we have fallen into the trap of idealising men’s lives and framing them as free, equating paid work with freedom. But paid labour isn’t necessarily freedom. There are many men who are exploited or work in terrible conditions. Where’s the policy to liberate them?  

Could the resurgence of “traditional” gender roles – as promoted in the “manosphere” and the “tradwife” online movements – be partly understood as a reaction to these failures rather than simply a backlash against women’s emancipation?  

When it comes to care, many of the distinctions between right-wing and left-wing positions tend to collapse. Sometimes I see overlaps in places I didn’t expect. “Tradwives” and other socially conservative people often ask for the same things that progressive people ask for: more community, more time with children, less market dominance in our lives, more focus on love and social relationships, and a reaction against individualism. When I hear a conservative woman say that life is more than work, that what matters are the people we love, I find myself nodding. Then she might add that the man’s role is to dominate, and that’s where she loses me.  

But we should not underestimate the potential to speak about these issues across differences. When I speak to nurses in hospitals, they suddenly realise they find common ground on this, even with people they usually disagree with politically. The devaluation of care is the core of both right- and left-wing anger right now.  

 Does the devaluation of care help explain Europe’s consistently low birth rates over the last few decades?  

If I were to speak to a politician who cares about economic growth and wants women to have more children, I’d tell them to start by offering better childcare and longer parental leave. I was brought up in the 1990s and 2000s, thinking that we had gender equality, and women would live lives that were completely like men’s. Many of us were more educated than most men and made more money than many men. But when they had children, many in my generation were shocked to find out how much gender still mattered.  

But I don’t think it’s just a matter of affordability. Birth rates are declining worldwide, regardless of the cost of living situation. This can be a good thing from a feminist perspective, especially if very young women are waiting longer to have children. But it also has to do with the types of societies we have created, where having children can be quite lonely and make it very difficult to spend time on anything else, including work and hobbies.  

Do pro-birth policies focusing narrowly on economic incentives miss the point?  

Economic theory and policymaking lack a theory of culture, but economics and culture go hand in hand. What we value economically tends to spill over into what we value culturally, and vice versa. The decision to have or not to have children is influenced by both cultural change and economic considerations. Yet when economists speak about demographics, they are at the limit of their theoretical capabilities because culture is simply not something they’re used to dealing with. In their market theory, there is no place for family choices. In a way, you could say that economics is supremely feminist in that rational market agents have no body and no gender. For many economists, I’m a consumer in the same way that a man is, at least until I become pregnant.  

You could say that economics is supremely feminist in that rational market agents have no body and no gender

There are, of course, exceptions. Alice Evans, for example, has done a lot of empirical work, interviewing women around the world about their choices to have or not have children. She found that cultural factors, such as social media use, can have a major impact on reproductive choices because they give access to different types of women’s lives and different female cultures, showing that options other than having a family also exist. She calls this phenomenon “cultural leapfrogging”.

The Left seems more reluctant to talk about demographic crisis or decline. Is there a way of reframing the issue in a more progressive way rather than surrendering it to right-wing narratives and cultural panic?  

Demographic decline is an umbrella term for many things, some of them good and others concerning. We should be extremely concrete in how we talk about decline and what we are worried about. My biggest worry is that, if the state retreats, the ever-expanding group of elderly people will have to be cared for by their daughters, as is already the case all over Europe.  

But there’s also an opportunity to think creatively about how we adapt to the new demographic situation. We cannot leave these big decisions to the market – the state needs to play a big role, too. All over Europe, we’re already seeing major recruitment issues in hospitals because pay is so low. From a green perspective, more jobs in care can be good news because it is a very sustainable type of work, and one that is extremely useful to society.  

Maybe the best way is to understand what we are going through as a care crisis, not a demographic one. It’s a new situation, and we need to adapt.  

Pro-birth policies tend to focus on heterosexual couples or, at best, the nuclear family model with two parents raising children. Is it time we question this norm?  

The family organisation of two parents raising children is actually quite unique in human history. It is the configuration that takes the least time away from the market because it is very steady and small; it requires little organising.  

If you ask any feminist economist what her main policy goal is, she will probably choose a shorter working day, which means more time in the home. Of course, there can be downsides, and we see it in countries where family care has a bigger cultural role: women tend to make less money and be less independent, which in turn creates a patriarchal family structure. However, there’s also the upside that families are more connected and have closer relationships, so we need to strike the right balance.  

This isn’t just about raising children. In Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe, we tend to just hide elderly people away. When someone cannot work anymore or is no longer self-sufficient, we don’t really want to see them; we don’t want them in the home. When I speak with Muslim feminists who have migrated to Europe, they tell me they find this to be extremely inhumane; they have a much more integrated relationship with elderly people in day-to-day life. 

In the new demographic reality, opening up the home means not only more care for those who need it, but also more help with raising children – and this doesn’t mean the state shouldn’t play its role in providing care. But we have closed off the home too much, and I think we see it in the crisis of loneliness that many adults are facing.  

As the harmful effects of social media platforms have become undeniable, the exciting promise of a globalised public square has given way to growing anxieties over uncontrolled digital addiction. Children and adolescents, with their hyperactive cerebral reward systems, are especially vulnerable to algorithms designed to grab users’ attention at any cost. A number of countries, both within and outside Europe, are weighing whether to ban minors from social media. However, some argue that such restrictions will not solve the problem.

This article is part of the Green European Journal’s upcoming print edition on demographic futures, out in early June. Subscribe now and get it delivered straight to your door.

Social media has shaped generations in ways both exciting and unsettling. For Guilherme Alexandre Jorge (24, member of Volt Europa in Portugal) and Anna Mazzei (23, member of the Italian Young Greens), it began as a gateway to knowledge and connection. Jorge joined Twitter at 15: “I started following people, then exploring what different topics meant, and I started becoming more aware of issues both globally and locally.” Mazzei, who began using social media at 14, followed pages run by younger creators rather than traditional media, finding them more engaging. “Once I got into activism,” she recalls, “it was also a way to see who shared my views and to follow green activists in Italy and abroad. It helped me to feel part of something.”  

More than a decade ago, social media was largely celebrated as a portal to a globalised world: fast access to news, digital encounters with loved ones abroad, and communities bound by shared interests. In 2010, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was named Time’s Person of the Year, emblematic of the promise of this new digital era. Those years now feel distant, and social media has gone from being seen as a revolutionary communication tool to being treated by courts and regulators as a system that maximises attention through aggressive algorithms at the expense of users’ mental health. In 2026, Zuckerberg is more likely to make headlines for legal cases and fines imposed on his company, Meta. 

Over 90 per cent of Europeans see an urgent need to protect children online.

According to the 2025 Eurobarometer report The Digital Decade, over 90 per cent of Europeans see an urgent need to protect children online, citing the negative impact of social media on mental health (93 per cent), cyberbullying (92 per cent), and the importance of restricting access to age-inappropriate content (92 per cent). In response to citizens’ concerns, governments have begun taking action. In December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to enforce a law banning access to social media for users under 16, requiring platforms to implement age detection systems. In Europe, France has passed legislation restricting access for minors under 15 unless parental consent is provided, while Spain is currently advancing a law to ban access for those under 16, with mandatory platform-based age verification. Other countries, including Portugal, Germany, Norway, and Italy, rely primarily on parental consent models for regulating minors’ access.  

The European Parliament, too, overwhelmingly backs restricting children’s access to social media. At the end of 2025, it passed a non-binding resolution stating that minors should not access social media before the age of 16, although parents could give consent from age 13. While the document has no legal force, it places political pressure on the European Commission, which now holds the power to turn these recommendations into actual EU legislation. 

Digital drug 

These developments respond to growing concerns among experts, teachers, and families about excessive smartphone use and the risks social media poses to young people, particularly in terms of mental health, exposure to harmful content, and cyberbullying. While there is broad, across-the-board agreement that social media presents a genuine and pressing challenge, there is far less consensus on how best to address it. Some advocate strict measures like age-based bans, whereas others favour solutions centred on education, digital literacy, and platform accountability, reflecting broader tensions between protection and autonomy and differing views on who should bear responsibility. Consequently, the measures banning social media use for minors have sparked scepticism and debate over whether such restrictions address the root of the problem or merely act as a partial and potentially ineffective fix, raising broader questions about enforcement, privacy, and the role of platforms themselves.  

Shortly before proposing the law to restrict social media access for minors in November 2025, the Spanish government presented the most comprehensive study to date on the impact of technology on childhood and adolescence. The study Childhood, Adolescence, and Digital Wellbeing, published by Red.es, UNICEF Spain, the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the Spanish General Council of Computer Engineering, gathers the voices of nearly 100,000 children and adolescents in Spain. According to the research, 41 per cent of children had their own smartphone at age 10 and 76 per cent by age 12. Nearly 20 per cent of those surveyed aged 10 to 20 say they spend more than five hours a day on social media at weekends, and intensive use is associated with higher anxiety, lower quality of life, and greater exposure to harassment, cyberbullying, and digital control in romantic relationships.  

Further evidence suggests that by delaying the introduction of smartphones to children until they are 13 or 14 – rather than at 10.8 years, which is the average age in Spain – problems such as video game addiction, exposure to sexting and pornography, and contact with strangers are reduced by half.  

“The scientific evidence we have shows that the increasingly early introduction of smartphones, and social media in particular, into the lives of minors is not harmless. It takes away more than it gives,” summarises Antonio Rial, co‑leader of the national study, senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and a leading expert on adolescent behaviour, digital media, and non‑substance addictions.  

The adolescent brain, with its hyperactive reward system and still-immature executive control, is highly vulnerable to social media mechanisms designed to capture users’ attention at all costs. Anna Lembke, one of the first researchers to document this effect, wrote in her 2021 book Dopamine Nation, “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.” 

In other words, parents have good reasons to worry. María Gijón, author of the 2026 book Tú puedes dejar tu móvil si sabes cómo (“You Can Quit Your Phone if You Know How”) and mother to a 12-year-old, directs the Madrid branch of Adolescencia Libre de Móviles (“Smartphone-Free Adolescence”). The movement began in 2023 with a conversation among concerned mothers in a park in Barcelona’s Poblenou district, and has since grown into a nationwide initiative. Its goal is to bring families together around delaying smartphone use for children. “The idea is that if we all agree to wait until later, it becomes easier to resist the social pressure we used to feel to hand over a smartphone at age 12,” Gijón explains. The association, unsurprisingly, supports the Spanish government’s proposed measures to limit minors’ access to social media. 

Gijón believes that minors and adolescents are not using their phones for activities like learning how to play the piano or studying three languages. “Those cases are a needle in a haystack,” she explains. “What we are talking about here is public health, and in public health we have to focus on the majority.” Rial and Gijón both emphasise that banning social media use for minors under 16 would protect economically vulnerable families in particular, as the children of poorer households tend to use digital devices more excessively than others. While digital addiction is a global problem that does not differ by socio-economic status, race, or gender, not every child has the opportunity to attend a good school where they can be guided in the proper use of technology. “The lower the socio-economic level, the greater the misinformation and, likely, the greater the harm. This makes preventive action through legislation even more necessary,” says Rial.  

The expert’s position is clear: social media should be illegal for minors, just as alcohol and tobacco are. “For once and for all, policymakers have sided with minors, who need to be protected. They have sided with families, who need support and guidance. And they have called out the tech industry, making it clear that the greatest share of responsibility lies with them, not with the children or their families,” he says.  

Disease and cure 

As governments move to regulate platforms, the tech industry has responded shrewdly, flooding public discourse with content that highlights the benefits of social media and presents digital education as the primary solution to mitigate its shortcomings. But there are also experts who, despite criticising the way these platforms operate, oppose measures that restrict minors’ access, arguing that the cure may be worse than the disease. 

Those who believe minors should retain access argue that social media provides adolescents with information, connection, and role models they might not encounter in their family or school environments. For many marginalised groups, these social platforms have served as a vital space for self-expression and finding community. “If we pursue bans without exploring alternatives, we end up depriving them of participation in public life, as well as a wide range of opportunities for connection and learning,” says Marta G. Franco, a journalist, social media expert, and author of the 2024 book Las redes son nuestras (“Social Media Is Ours”), who describes herself as “citizen of the Internet since 1999”. 

Alexandra Geese, a Green member of the European Parliament who works on digital issues, agrees: “We shouldn’t punish kids instead of the platforms. A ban should address specific social media platforms that don’t comply with the rules for the protection of minors.” At the same time, she says, “We should support initiatives to build a better internet. They could offer safe spaces for kids and should not be affected by a ban.” 

Franco points out that, despite growing calls to restrict social media, government officials continue to rely on these platforms to relay real-time information. She notes, for instance, that following a major train accident in January, the Spanish transport minister shared live updates on rail services via Twitter, underscoring the state’s dependence on social media as an instant communication tool. 

Moreover, critics warn that bans would undermine efforts to enhance youth engagement in politics. Mazzei points to a paradox: If 16-year-olds are allowed to vote, as is the case in a growing number of European countries, does it make sense to restrict their access to information on social media until then? 

Franco also cautions against drawing sweeping conclusions from studies. While youth anxiety and depression increased around the same time social media became widespread, between 2010 and 2015, other factors – such as the global economic crisis – may have contributed to that outcome. Franco adds that in the United States, where many of these studies originate, screenings began to be conducted among adolescents around the same time, potentially creating the impression of a surge in mental health issues. “Just because two things happen at the same time does not necessarily mean one causes the other. It is even worth asking whether the reverse could be true: that psychological problems may lead to increased social media use,” she notes. 

If 16-year-olds are allowed to vote, as is the case in a growing number of European countries, does it make sense to restrict their access to information on social media until then? 

Rial disagrees: “Levels of anxiety, somatisation, and depression triple, and the risk of suicide quadruples, among adolescents who clearly show a pattern of maladaptive social media use. Could it be that a young person with emotional deficiencies, or an existing mental health problem, is more likely to develop this type of social media use? Of course. The relationship is bidirectional, but that does not exclude the existence of the first direction.”  

Like Rial, Franco is critical of digital spaces created by private companies and designed to extract maximum profit from our data, and in her work, she advocates for alternative environments that foster healthier interactions. However, she thinks banning access altogether means throwing out the baby with the bathwater. 

Asking the right question 

Nicoleta Prutean, senior governance analyst at the Centre for Future Generations (CFG) and an expert in brain science and psychology, works on shaping policies to safeguard mental health in the era of technological acceleration. She believes that age-based restrictions are a political response to an ill-posed question. “The question, ‘Does social media harm mental health?’ sounds to me very much like asking, ‘Does food harm physical health?’ Food can be good, but also bad.” In her view, the right approach is to ask which features in the design of social media are harmful. “The answers would be the recommender system features, the interface features, the infinite scrolling, the autoplay, the variable rewards that exploit our attention capacity and our reward sensitivity,” she notes. Disregarding the fact that the problems of social media are at the design level risks leaving us vulnerable to new technologies – such as generative AI – that may replicate those features. “If we keep focusing just on social media as a whole and not on the mechanisms, we will miss other technologies where these mechanisms are even stronger.”  

Current EU legislation specifically addresses the features of digital platforms that are known to disrupt mental health. “The Digital Services Act (DSA) looks at the right objects, it acknowledges that the design of the systems has a very important role to play and has a financial penalty,” Prutean explains. In February 2026, the European Commission disclosed preliminary DSA findings about TikTok, concluding that its addictive features – such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and highly personalised recommendations – may violate the law by failing to mitigate risks to users’ wellbeing. If confirmed, TikTok could face fines of up to 6 per cent of its global annual turnover, the DSA’s maximum for serious violations. 

Disregarding the fact that the problems of social media are at the design level risks leaving us vulnerable to new technologies – such as generative AI – that may replicate those features. 

Geese also calls for targeting specific platform practices. “Rather than discussing a general social media ban, we should single out problematic practices like algorithms privileging borderline content, targeting, and addictive features. On the basis of the Digital Services Act, the European Commission could already enforce better rules for social media.” 

However, Prutean argues, both the measures restricting minors’ access to social media and the DSA overlook the broader spectrum of mental wellbeing. The former reduces it to the absence of pain, but Prutean also emphasises that, “Being healthy mentally also means being empowered, for example. We shouldn’t hope for future generations just to not be depressed or anxious; we should hope for more.” In the case of the DSA, she notes that harm often occurs long before a clinical pathology emerges. “This is not clearly explicit [in the legislation]. Broadening the definition of mental harm and providing scientific evidence and benchmarks would make these laws more enforceable. The reference to mental health is there, but the threshold for what constitutes harm is just not very clear, making enforcement difficult.”  

For Franco, “It’s somewhat paradoxical that we are constantly hearing calls to create new laws, while at the same time Spain is one of the countries [along with Germany and France] supporting the deregulation of data protection laws through the Digital Omnibus, which is currently being debated in the European Commission.” She notes that Spain is also behind in transposing the DSA, which mandates the establishment of a national authority for its implementation. 

Holding platforms accountable 

A central challenge of measures restricting minors’ access is the age verification system. Australia’s world‑first ban has struggled in practice: the law does not mandate specific technology, leaving platforms to choose their methods. While millions of underage accounts have been closed, many minors remain active because verification tools are imperfect and platforms allow multiple workarounds. By contrast, Spain (and more broadly, the EU) is developing a privacy‑preserving protocol by which users would hold a cryptographic credential – similar to a digital ID – that proves their age without revealing personal details. Stored in a digital wallet, the credential is presented securely to platforms, which are only informed whether or not the user meets the age requirement, not given their full identity. 

While Gijón stresses the need to accompany restrictions with an effective age verification system that ensures compliance by platforms (including through penalties severe enough to deter rule-breaking) and prevents minors from easily circumventing the measures, Franco is wary of the risk of online activities being tracked to users’ legal identities. She warns, “No matter how much we are told that it will be handled in a way that doesn’t involve sharing our identity with the platform, any data we leave behind is extremely risky and can potentially be captured in some way.” Geese has similar concerns: “It is vital that no additional data – and in particular, no biometric data – is used. Biometric data can be used for sexualised images or for political surveillance many years later.” 

The people interviewed for this article offered different solutions to the social media problem, but they all agreed on two points: that the way social media is currently designed does not exclusively affect minors, and that major tech companies should be held accountable. Jorge notes that while breaking minors’ screen addiction would bring clear benefits, the issue cannot be framed as affecting children and adolescents alone, and that is why intervention needs to focus on the algorithms that drive compulsive engagement. “I’m 24 now, and I am still glued to my phone,” he says. Mazzei, meanwhile, highlights the importance of enabling young people to participate in a digital society, even as she warns against an “unmanaged algorithm”. She does not take a firm position on the debate, but cautions against outright bans, suggesting that “banning” may be the wrong approach: “Maybe restricting or moderating access is better.” 

Rial, meanwhile, situates the debate within a wider democratic concern, asking, “If we look at the problem mor deeply, this is a question about the quality of democracy. Studies in the US show that 80 per cent of hate speech is driven by just 20 per cent of users or accounts. What happens with that?” 

The digital space, once celebrated as a democratic public forum, today resembles more a shopping mall than a town square. The alternative, Franco argues, lies in fostering different digital environments: “This means greater public collaboration with companies and citizens to build digital spaces based on open-source software and other guiding principles.”  

While such collaboration is being attempted, “the mental, physical, and social health of children and adolescents continues to decline,” Gijón worries. “Technology is advancing far faster than legislation, and the only way to protect minors – who lack the capacity to self-regulate in the face of addictive designs or tools – is to delay their age of access.”  

Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz was defeated by a grassroots movement that faced down systematic intimidation in an extraordinary act of popular mobilisation. The attempt to restart democracy in Hungary stands a better chance of success than at any time since 1989. Will Péter Magyar take the country in the right direction?  

The events in Budapest on the night of Viktor Orbán’s election defeat on 12 April were pivotal and unforgettable. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets in a carnival-style fiesta. This level of popular enthusiasm was seen neither in October 1989, when the new republic was proclaimed, nor in May 1990, when the first democratically elected government was formed. “It was like winning the World Cup,” witnesses said. 

Younger generations, who have spent all their adult lives under Orbán’s rule, campaigned hardest for change and feel that they are the main winners. Generation Z’s overwhelming support for Péter Magyar’s Tisza party spread to older age groups, too, and was a game-changer across the country. 

According to political scientists Andrea Szabó and Zoltán Gábor Szűcs-Zágoni, what happened on 12 April 2026 was “not just a critical election, a landslide or a change of government. It can truly be described as an electoral revolution: a bloodless constitutional political shift marking the beginning of a new era driven by the collective power of society.” 

What made this “electoral revolution” possible? What consequences is Viktor Orbán’s downfall likely to have in Hungary, Europe and beyond? And how easy will it be to restore democracy to a country in which the division of powers has effectively collapsed? 

Changing course 

The Hungarian constitutional system is modelled on Germany’s Kanzlerdemokratie and gives the prime minister a particularly strong position vis-à-vis the other parts of government. However, after 2010, Orbán effectively turned Hungary into an “absolute republic”, a term coined by political scientists Gábor Török and Péter Farkas Zárug to describe a system combining electoral democracy with the unrestrained use of state resources and a personality cult surrounding the leader.¹

János Széky wrote in Élet és Irodalom that Magyar’s victory in fact ends Viktor Orbán’s 28-year reign, which began during his first term in office between 1998 and 2002. But the significance of the 12 April vote pertains to an even larger period of recent Hungarian history. These elections also mark nearly four decades since the transformation from a one-party system to a Western-type liberal democracy in 1989. 

A former frontrunner of westernisation in the east-central European context, Hungary began to lose ground in the 2000s. The overwhelming vote for change can be interpreted as a call for another push towards the West after the previous attempt in 1989–90, which started promisingly but ultimately failed. 

The 12 April election also marks the end of decades of fruitless and detrimental political rivalry between a triumphant radical right and an increasingly frustrated and powerless Left. The “cold civil war” that Orbán has been waging since 2004 with his left-wing counterpart, the former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, has finally ended in mutual destruction. Gyurcsány’s Democratic Coalition received just one per cent of the popular vote and will not be represented in parliament. Orbán is also leaving parliament after 36 continuous years as an MP. 

For the first time since 1920, there will be no left-wing or liberal parties in the Hungarian parliament. The political landscape now comprises three different shades of right: EU-compatible, moderate conservatism (Tisza); anti-EU radical illiberalism (Fidesz); and neofascism (Mi Hazánk, or “Our Motherland”). 

The absence of left-liberal opposition in the Hungarian parliament sends a grim message to the rest of Europe. If left-wing political parties cannot connect with voters, those voters will have to look elsewhere for political representation. Almost two-thirds of the 3.4 million Hungarians who voted for Tisza came from liberal, left-wing or green backgrounds. There are several new MPs in the 141-strong Tisza group with left-wing and/or liberal leanings. Despite its conservative profile, represented by Magyar himself, Tisza is a surprisingly diverse party, where leaders and rank-and-file activists from different backgrounds coexist. 

Political scientist Balázs Jarábik has argued that the elections demonstrated Hungary’s ongoing democratic potential. But if Péter Magyar truly intends to effect change, he must address the long-standing illiberal tendency to grant the government almost unlimited power. Will Magyar make wise use of the complex network of legal instruments that could easily transform a democratically elected prime minister into a plebiscitarian leader and potential autocrat? And can he resist the temptation to use his supermajority to consolidate his personal power? 

These are the real questions awaiting answers. Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian path was not an anomaly or a bug in the system, but the extreme consequence of a constitutional mindset anchored in the idea of a dominant party and “stable” governance. 

A defeat for Putin 

Following the vote, Fidesz pundits began arguing that Orbán’s swift acceptance of the results showed that the system was far less authoritarian than his opponents claimed. However, this is contradicted by the evidence. For almost two years, Fidesz had employed a variety of tactics, legal and illegal, to suppress the dissent voiced by Tisza. Since 2024, the Hungarian government had exploited the powers of the security agencies and received covert support from Russia and, to a lesser extent, the United States to destroy the only genuine contender and secure Orbán’s fifth consecutive term in office. 

Orbán’s ultimate decision not to crack down on the opposition was motivated not by respect for the democratic will of the Hungarian people but because of an unprecedented display of force from Europe. It is tempting here to draw a parallel with the changes of 1989. However, in 1989, the peaceful transformation of communist Hungary into a multi-party democracy was supported by all the major powers and took place at the end of the East–West ideological divide. During this election campaign, by contrast, both Putin’s Russia and Trump’s United States openly backed Fidesz. 

Since late February, Orbán had been plagued by damaging press leaks. These originated from an entity of which Hungary was still a part, but which Orbán had started to label as his “main enemy”: the European Union. Several European security agencies cooperating on the Hungarian file had intercepted phone conversations between Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, as well as between Orbán and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. They revealed a pattern of strategic cooperation and moral collusion that made Orbán’s presence in Brussels undesirable. 

The exposure of the public misconduct of senior Hungarian officials went far beyond the well-known issue of systemic corruption. The failed geopolitical ventures of the Orbán system were exposed, including the attempted armed rescue of former Bosnian–Serb leader Milorad Dodik in 2025, which was thwarted by decisive American intervention, and the scandal surrounding the planned Hungarian military mission to Chad. While rumours could be heard in diplomatic and military circles about Hungarian involvement in the African operations of the infamous Wagner Group, the truth appears to be more straightforward. The deployment of 200 military personnel to a high-risk combat zone of little strategic importance to Hungary may have been driven by the glory-seeking ambitions of Gáspár Orbán – the son of the outgoing prime minister and then-army captain – who wanted to save local Christians regardless of potential losses among his fellow soldiers. 

According to analysts in both the West and Russia, Orbán’s departure represents a significant strategic setback for Putin. Although Hungary is not a major military or economic power, it has played a crucial political role in advancing Russian interests. Moscow has lost its most valuable and long-cultivated “insider” within the European Union and NATO. As a legitimate European leader rather than a puppet, Orbán was the Kremlin’s most effective tool within the West. 

Moscow secures loyalty by offering cash, business opportunities, and political attention. Amplifying fears of migration, war, and the loss of national identity has helped to translate pro-Kremlin sentiments into local politics across the region. Now, with the collapse of the invincibility myth, other pillars of Russian influence in East-Central Europe may also be under threat. 

Moscow has lost its most valuable and long-cultivated “insider” within the European Union and NATO. […] Now, with the collapse of the invincibility myth, other pillars of Russian influence in East-Central Europe may also be under threat. 

Péter Magyar has said his government will seek pragmatic cooperation with Russia, particularly on energy, and an immediate “crusade” against Moscow is not in sight. Nevertheless, Hungary will cease to be a “spanner in the works” in the EU, enabling more coherent decision-making. Putin’s loss of his only real foothold in Europe is a significant setback for Russian foreign policy. 

The revolt of “deep Hungary” 

Much has been said and written about Péter Magyar, the mole within the system who has exposed its moral decay and corruption more than anyone else. Gábor Bruck, one of Hungary’s leading election campaign strategists, has said that in his many decades in the field, he has never witnessed a performance of such calibre. For around two years, Magyar travelled the length and breadth of the country – literally on foot for weeks at a time – visiting no fewer than 700 locations and reaching millions of citizens in person. Many Hungarians living outside Budapest had never had the opportunity to shake hands with or speak to a national politician. 

Counting on the support of Budapest – a long-standing stronghold of the anti-Fidesz liberal left – Magyar instead focused on the hidden, invisible Hungary of 2,500 villages and hundreds of small towns with populations of just a few thousand. The election results show that support for Tisza was spread across the whole country and not limited to the cities. Orbán’s electoral and cultural stronghold, “deep Hungary”, turned its back on him and embraced the vision of radical change promoted by Magyar. 

However, it would be reductive to focus solely on the top level of the Tisza Party. Magyar deserves historic credit for daring to issue an existential challenge to Orbán’s power within the unfair electoral system Orbán had established. Nevertheless, he had something that Orbán’s power machine lacked: a genuine grassroots movement with widespread support. In the years to come, Tisza will likely be studied as the model of a “popular front” democratic mobilisation, capable of uniting right, left and centre behind a common cause. 

The party’s structure was organised into three distinct yet loosely connected tiers. The first was Péter Magyar, a political animal with innate charisma, a huge capacity for work, and exceptional strategic instincts. András Körösényi, the doyen of Hungarian political scientists, pointed out that Magyar’s extraordinary success highlights not only the fragility of an autocratic system, but also an increasingly widespread and pronounced trend towards plebiscitary democracy. 

The second tier, which has so far been almost imperceptible, concerns the party as a formal political structure. With only a few dozen members, the party could easily be described as an electoral committee centred around its founder and natural leader. 

The third tier is perhaps the most intriguing. Since 2024, over two thousand “Tisza islands” have spontaneously formed in hundreds of Hungarian localities, including villages where there has probably been no political activity since 1945-46 or the turbulent days of the 1956 uprising. 

Although it is impossible to estimate the exact number, it is safe to say that hundreds of thousands of people have been actively involved in opposition politics over the past two years. This is in a country with barely eight million potential voters. The Tisza Islands have no legal status and are not formally affiliated with the small party headquarters. The members form a grassroots civic community of equals and have become a powerful example of informal, bottom-up democracy in a country that has lost its institutional democracy. After long complaining about the lack of civic commitment and interclass solidarity in Hungarian society, social scientists have finally found a topic of great interest: the emergence of a politically oriented social force outside the traditionally progressive capital city of Budapest. 

The best example of grassroots action came on election day, when Tisza mobilised 50,000 unpaid volunteers. Despite the personal risks, they dedicated themselves to political change – the first time this has happened in recent Hungarian history. Almost 5,000 civilians patrolled the polling stations most affected by Fidesz’s well-established vote-buying scheme. As the documentary film A szavazat ára (“The price of the vote”) revealed, this ranged from bussing voters to polling stations to handing out alcohol and drugs to addicts. Fidesz reportedly even threatened to take away people’s jobs or custody of their children. Vote-buying gained the ruling party more than 200,000 votes in 2022; its campaign strategists hoped it would secure up to twice that number in 2026. 

The presence of these volunteers, who were travelling around by car or motorcycle, managed to curb the phenomenon. In areas where “electoral tourism” had been most heavily monitored, observers prevented tens of thousands of people from voting fraudulently. 

Tisza is also leading a quiet gender revolution in a country where politics has always been heavily male-dominated. Women make up one-third of its parliamentary group, while only 17 of Fidesz’s 135 MPs during the previous parliamentary term were women. According to the party’s list, successful businesswoman Ágnes Forsthoffer will become president of the National Assembly, while the former diplomat and energy expert Anita Orbán has been designated foreign minister. 

The greater presence of women in the Tisza is not the result of compliance with “gender quotas”, but a sociological reality and cultural breakthrough. Female activism has played a decisive role in establishing and operating Tisza. These women are primarily middle-aged and active in the private sector. Dissatisfied with the state of the country, they have the time and practical experience of managing daily life to contribute to the community. 

Democratic culture 

All this said, the damage inflicted on representative democracy in Hungary between 2010 and 2026 will be long-lasting. Orbán’s System of National Cooperation found fertile ground due to the established pattern of patronage-based autocracy and the lack of functioning democratic models. 

The largely spontaneous social mobilisation that brought about the downfall of the Orbán regime is not enough to overcome the longstanding weakness of Hungary’s democratic culture. Magyar’s parliamentary supermajority enables him to dismantle the former power system brick by brick without putting the legal system under strain, as happened in Poland after the defeat of PiS in 2023. The question is whether he will be able to restrain his own almost unlimited power, or whether his charismatic leadership of the party will backfire when serious issues concerning democratic standards arise. 

Perhaps even more importantly, the new government will need to democratise the education system and political discourse. Mutual hate, grievances and scapegoating must be replaced by a new collaborative spirit. The hundreds of thousands of young people who voted for democracy and integration with the West should be given the opportunity to learn about democracy while attempting to implement it. 

The support received by the new elite on 12 April brings great historical responsibility. Magyar and his government will need to study the errors made during the 20-year experiment that began in 1989–90 in order to avoid repeating them. For example, the political reintegration of the former authoritarian elite should be preceded by a process of lustration; crimes should be prosecuted and publicly exposed. 

Above all, however, the new government must abandon the anti-democratic practices deeply rooted in the past century – from Miklós Horthy to Viktor Orbán and János Kádár – and establish a democratic state capable of addressing the numerous challenges of the current one. 

This article first appeared in Eurozine. It is republished here with permission.

1. Péter Zárug Farkas, Gábor Török: Orbán ​kora. Vázlat egy abszolút köztársaság felemelkedéséről, Budapest, L’Harmattan, 2026. ︎

Europe’s climate movement is often portrayed as the domain of younger generations. Yet from landmark legal victories to everyday practices of sustainability, a different picture is emerging: older Europeans are proving to be among the most committed and effective climate actors. As the continent continues to age, could this overlooked demographic reshape how climate action is understood and mobilised across Europe?

In April 2024, a group of Swiss women, most of them in their 70s and 80s, stood on the steps of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, surrounded by a wall of microphones and cameras from around the world. They had just heard the verdict in one of the most significant climate cases in European legal history. The KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz had won.

The ruling found Switzerland in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights for failing to adequately protect its citizens from the effects of climate change. The judgment, formally known as Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz v. Switzerland, now sets binding legal precedent across all 46 Council of Europe member states. Switzerland has since pushed hard for the case to be closed, but the Committee of Ministers, which monitors its implementation, has refused the request twice.

The story of how about 3,000 Swiss women forced their country to one of the highest courts in Europe is striking in its own right. Yet it also points to something broader: a growing, largely invisible force within the climate movement that Europe’s ageing democracies might not be able to overlook for much longer.

Beyond the generational divide

The climate movement’s most visible faces – such as activists Greta Thunberg in Sweden or Féris Barkat in France – tend to be on the younger (if not much younger) side, and it has become common to identify Gen Z as its most fervent defender. But researchers who study the intersection of ageing and environmental engagement argue that the mainstream perception of generations within the climate movement may be flawed.

“There is a slight tendency for younger generations to have opinions that are more favourable towards climate policy,” said Jan Rosset, a sociologist at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland who has studied climate engagement across age groups in Switzerland alongside political scientist Jasmine Lorenzini. “But all generations are very favourable to climate policies. There is no real generational divide.”

That finding echoes the conclusions of a 2025 study published by Parlons Climat, a French research organisation, which found that older adults take climate change and environmental degradation just as seriously as the rest of the population. The myth of a disengaged older generation does not seem to hold up to scrutiny.

What differs across generations, Rosset and Lorenzini found, is not the level of concern but the form that engagement takes. Older adults are significantly more likely to buy local and seasonal produce for environmental reasons, to renounce air travel on ecological grounds, and to practice unglamorous household sustainability: buying second-hand, reducing electricity use, cooking from scratch. Younger people, on the other hand, might be more likely to adopt plant-based diets and participate in public protests. It should, however, be noted that the data is mixed.

Researchers who study the intersection of ageing and environmental engagement argue that the mainstream perception of generations within the climate movement may be flawed.

“On almost every indicator, it is people in mid-life, those between roughly 35 and 60, who engage the least,” Rosset says. “But that is not an ideological position. It’s a question of time and capacity; they have demanding jobs and family responsibilities. It is a life-cycle issue, not a generational one.”

Rosset and Lorenzini also found a consistent gender gap: across all age groups, but especially among older adults, women showed significantly more favourable attitudes toward climate action and higher levels of engagement than men.

“This gap was almost stronger than other socioeconomic factors, like income or education level,” Rosset said.

The case that set a precedent

When Greenpeace Switzerland began exploring the possibility of legal climate action in the mid-2010s, it ran into an obstacle: Swiss law does not allow class actions. Any case would need to be brought by individuals who could demonstrate they were personally and particularly affected. The research pointed to one group. Studies following the 2003 European heatwave – which killed an estimated 70,000 people across the continent, with the elderly among the hardest hit – had shown that older women died in disproportionate numbers. More recent research has confirmed this vulnerability: a 2024 study by Penn State researchers found that older women reach dangerous heat thresholds at lower temperature and humidity levels than older men and that middle-aged women are as heat-vulnerable as men over 65.

Heatwaves increase illnesses, causing heat stroke, heart and lung problems, diabetes complications, mental health issues, and trouble with daily activities. The vulnerability of older generations is not just physical: many live alone, have limited mobility, or cannot easily access emergency services. People in cities face “heat island” effects, where concrete and asphalt trap heat, while rural residents often have fewer cooling centres or medical resources. Climate change also worsens air quality, raising levels of ozone, fine particulate matter, and other pollutants, which worsen respiratory and heart conditions. These combined factors make ageing populations especially vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change.

One senior activist who committed herself to the Swiss climate fight is Elisabeth Stern, a cultural anthropologist and board member of KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz. “It was clear that when I got retired, I would use my time in a climate group,” she said. “I tried a few that were not the right fit for me until I found the KlimaSeniorinnen, who I sort of met on the same eye level.”

Stern’s fellow activist, Anne Mahrer, KlimaSeniorinnen’s co-president, had spent years watching climate policy stall in parliament as a member of the Swiss National Council. When a colleague reminded her of the Urgenda case in the Netherlands, where a court had ordered the Dutch government in 2015 to cut emissions, the question became: could something similar be done in Switzerland? In August 2016, KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz was formally established to achieve that goal.

The Swiss courts, however, were not moved. At every level, the association was told it lacked standing. One court noted that the women were concerned not only about Swiss emissions but wanted to reduce them worldwide. Another placed winter tourism in the same category of climate-affected interests as the health of women threatened by heatwaves. The most striking argument, Stern recounts, was that the women might not still be alive by the time global warming reached 1.5 degrees and therefore could not complain. “If you follow their reasoning, climate action in court would only be possible when it’s already too late,” Mahrer said.

The European Court of Human Rights took a different view. It declared the application a priority case, engaged seriously with reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and referred the case to its Grand Chamber of 17 judges. “Unlike politicians, who do not listen to scientists, the judges listened to the scientists, and they took into account the third-party interventions in support of the case,” Mahrer explained.

The court delivered its verdict on 9 April, 2024. It found Switzerland in violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to respect for private and family life – which the court ruled encompasses a right to effective state protection against the severe effects of climate change on life, health, wellbeing, and quality of life. Switzerland was also found to have violated Article 6 – the right to a fair trial – for its domestic courts’ refusal to hear the case on its merits.

The ripple effects spread quickly and travelled farther than anyone had anticipated. The ruling is now cited in climate litigation across Europe. In South Korea, groups of young activists successfully pursued a similar case. In the Netherlands, residents of the island of Bonaire have taken legal action against the Dutch state, drawing on the KlimaSeniorinnen precedent. The International Court of Justice, prompted by the small island nation of Vanuatu, issued an advisory opinion in July 2025 stating that governments which fail to protect their populations from climate harm are acting unlawfully, reinforcing the Strasbourg ruling and opening new avenues for litigation worldwide.

Across Europe, a generation of older activists has been following a similar model. European Grandparents for Climate, active in Belgium and Norway, and Omas for Future in Germany and Austria, are building on the same instinct: that people who have watched the world change across six or seven decades have both a particular stake in the future and a special capacity to act.

European Grandparents for Climate participates in demonstrations, writes letters to ministers, and monitors parliamentary votes on climate at both the Belgian and European levels. In Germany, Omas for Future joins Fridays for Future strikes, runs climate workshops in schools, and has organised nationwide campaigns such as the “Klimabänder” initiative, in which thousands of handwritten climate messages were bicycled to Berlin ahead of the 2021 federal election.

Sustainability by habit

Beyond courts and campaigns, there is a quieter dimension to older adults’ climate engagement, rooted not in ideology but in force of habit and the practical knowledge of generations who lived before the age of mass consumption.

Serge Guérin, a French sociologist and author of Et si les vieux aussi sauvaient la planète? (“And what if the Elderly Also Saved the Planet?”), points to a kind of practical sustainability that older generations carry without naming it as such. They grew up returning glass bottles for a deposit, cooking whatever was in season, and mending rather than replacing. A startup working on bottle recycling, he recalls, found it far easier to explain the concept to older people because “When they were young, they used to return the milk bottle, the wine bottle, and get a few cents back. For them, it was totally normal,” he says.

Helene Blasquiet-Revol, a geographer whose research examines civic engagement among seniors in rural France, describes what she calls “ordinary” forms of climate engagement: practices so ingrained they are not even labelled as activism. For instance, she found that community gardens established by older residents in the Allier region gradually opened up to schools and youth workshops, transmitting practical knowledge in ways that were rarely planned or publicised.

There is a quieter dimension to older adults’ climate engagement, rooted not in ideology but in force of habit and the practical knowledge of generations who lived before the age of mass consumption.

Researchers are increasingly identifying the potential for a form of intergenerational knowledge transfer that is already happening informally, and which could be deliberately cultivated. Rosset, for instance, found that among older climate activists, there was no statistically significant relationship between having children or grandchildren and the propensity to get involved, meaning people were not fighting for their own descendants. “It is really universal,” Rosset said. “It is a solidarity expressed towards future generations, towards all of humanity. We did not expect that result at all.”

Renewal needs the old

Europe is ageing fast. According to projections from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the share of older adults across EU member states is growing steadily and will continue to do so for decades, driven by declining fertility rates and rising life expectancy. This demographic shift also increases the need for climate-adapted healthcare, adequate urban planning, and social support systems for vulnerable seniors.

“There is a widespread idea that with generational renewal, the problem will be solved, that new generations will be more environmentally conscious,” Rosset said. “Our research shows this is not the case. And in addition, there will be more and more older people.”

Guérin also notes that designing urban environments, housing, and transport for ageing populations often produces outcomes that are better for both people and the planet. Accessible public transport means more people leave their cars behind. Shared housing models reduce per-capita energy consumption. Local services cut down the need for long-distance travel. And when older people are less isolated, they are in better health.

“When you reduce isolation, people use fewer resources, they are less at risk and share more,” Guérin said, adding that these shifts can lower both land use and carbon footprints. “When you take vulnerability into account, you very often improve things for everyone. And it’s really when people feel their capacity to act, especially at the local level, that things begin to move.”

Stern sees the perception gap playing out in real time in media coverage. “There are certain media and certain politicians who want us to believe that interest in the climate has vanished,” she says. “It is in their interest to tell people: ‘It has vanished anyway, so you don’t have to get involved, just enjoy life.’ But the truth is, when you ask people what concerns them a lot, the climate crisis comes up either first or second.”

The KlimaSeniorinnen continue to monitor Switzerland’s compliance with the Strasbourg judgment, sending observations to the Committee of Ministers, lobbying ambassadors, and speaking at universities across the country. For Stern, meaningful compliance means confronting Switzerland’s financial sector, which through continued investment in fossil fuels generates emissions many times greater than those in the country itself. A documentary about the association’s decade-long legal journey recently toured cinemas.

Whatever the future of the climate movement and its coverage, it is clear that the generational conflict narrative is not accurate. The evidence from researchers points to something more complicated and more hopeful: a Europe where different generations, engaged in different ways, with different tools and different knowledge, are already working on the same problem.

Evidence that Parkinson’s, the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease globally, may be linked to pesticides used in agriculture has been accumulating for decades. Yet, after finally appearing to take experts’ concerns seriously, EU authorisation bodies have failed to take meaningful action. An excerpt from Dirk de Bekker’s book Het pesticidenparadijs (“Pesticide Paradise”).

“If you are the CEO of Bayer, tossing and turning in bed at night, how can you justify this to yourself… Suppose that Roundup is the cause of Parkinson’s, how are you able to sleep soundly?”

It is 29 March 2022. Sitting opposite me is Bas Bloem, professor of neurology and an internationally renowned expert on Parkinson’s disease. He has just explained to me, speaking rapidly and in precisely formulated sentences, which processes in the brain are disrupted when someone develops Parkinson’s disease. Although he speaks fluently and barely pauses for breath, something changes in him from the moment the words “pesticides” and “glyphosate” are uttered. His gaze becomes more intense, his voice louder, and his sentences a fraction slower.

We are at the Parkinson’s Center of Expertise at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, in the southeast of the Netherlands. Here, scientists are working on treatments for a disease that does not yet have a cure. Current therapies, procedures, and medication are aimed at slowing down and alleviating the symptoms. Tremors, stiff movements, and difficulty speaking – those are what the general public is familiar with, but describing Parkinson’s as “that shaking disease” is incorrect, says Bloem. “The disease is like an iceberg.” Most symptoms – including depression, dementia, bowel dysfunction, sleep disorders, balance problems, loss of smell, and pain – are often just as serious but are hidden beneath the surface.¹

Most people with Parkinson’s experience many symptoms simultaneously. Often, new ones continue to develop and become increasingly severe. As a result, the disease is very disruptive – both physically and mentally – for patients and their loved ones.

Bloem is sounding the alarm. Parkinson’s is the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease – not only in the Netherlands, where the number of cases has risen by 30 per cent over the last 10 years, but worldwide.² There are now approximately 12 million people globally with Parkinson’s. According to recent estimates, this figure will more than double by 2050 to 25 million.³

This explosive increase can be partly explained by age: Parkinson’s is more common at advanced ages, and the global population of older people is growing. Furthermore, average life expectancy is rising worldwide. However, even after adjusting for ageing, researchers are seeing rapid growth. So there is more to it than that.⁴

As early as the 1980s, there were strong scientific indications that exposure to pesticides was an important risk factor for the development of Parkinson’s disease. Over the past 10 years, the evidence supporting this has grown significantly.

For this reason, Bloem views Parkinson’s as a disease not primarily caused by ageing per se but by “all sorts of rubbish” in our environment. By this, he means pesticides and other hazardous substances. As people live longer, there is more time for them to be exposed to these substances. Furthermore, the disease often develops over decades before it manifests itself. As people live longer on average, this also means that accumulated neurological damage has a greater chance of becoming apparent.

As early as the 1980s, there were strong scientific indications that exposure to pesticides was an important risk factor for the development of Parkinson’s disease.

Growing concerns

A disease that is growing explosively, the increasingly clear link to pesticides, the fact that there is still no prospect of a cure – all of this is cause for concern. But Bloem’s full-blown alarm comes from somewhere else: a conversation he had at the Dutch Board for the Authorisation of Plant Protection Products and Biocides (the College voor de toelating van gewasbeschermingsmiddelen en biociden, Ctgb) in late 2020.

At his request, the Dutch authorisation body agreed to personally meet with him in November 2020 to explain step by step how the approval procedure for pesticides works. The meeting was intended to allay his concerns, but the opposite happened: he was struck with terror. “It was only then that I fully realised that we actually know nothing when it comes to the risk of Parkinson’s.”

During the presentation, Bloem was told that existing approval tests for the neurotoxicity of pesticides only examine external characteristics in laboratory animals. For example, do the animals move more slowly or display apathetic behaviour after coming into contact with a pesticide? “That is completely inadequate,” according to the neurologist. “It takes years for Parkinson’s to develop; you don’t immediately see anything on the outside. You therefore need to look inside the relevant areas of the brain: does the substance damage the substantia nigra?”

The substantia nigra (Latin for “black substance”) is the area of the brain where dopamine is produced. This chemical plays a key role in essential functions such as movement, memory and well-being. In people with Parkinson’s, the substantia nigra deteriorates, slowly but surely. It is only when 60 to 70 per cent of the substantia nigra has already been affected that the outward symptoms of Parkinson’s become noticeable. But by that point, the disease has already been long in the making. “You also need to know if, say, 40 per cent of the substantia nigra is destroyed and you can’t yet see anything externally. Currently, this is simply not tested.”

Bloem and his fellow neurologists are increasingly seeing patients in their clinics who report having been exposed to pesticides. They are not alone: more and more general practitioners and physiotherapists working in agriculture-intensive regions are also voicing concerns about the rising number of Parkinson’s cases they are seeing in their practices.⁵

^{The cover of Dirk de Bekker’s book Het pesticidenparadijs (“Pesticide Paradise”).}

“I recently had a woman with Parkinson’s at the outpatient clinic. She had just buried her husband, who also had Parkinson’s. In addition, six other people in her street had the disease. They live next to a field where small planes used to spray pesticides,” says Bloem.

Over the years that I have been publishing on pesticides, I have also regularly heard striking accounts from people with Parkinson’s who attribute their illness to pesticides. They mention having peeled bulbs for years, or working for the parks department with pesticide tanks on their backs and spray guns in their hands, or growing up on fruit farms where they played hide-and-seek in the orchards. I’ve also heard from people who have worked with pesticides for long periods of time in laboratories, in greenhouses, or on their own fields. Multiple members of a family are sometimes affected by the disease.

Puzzles and cocktails

The sheer frequency with which such personal anecdotes crop up is striking, although they prove nothing in themselves. But these stories do not stand alone.

A growing body of scientific studies shows that Parkinson’s disease occurs significantly more frequently among people living in areas of intensive cultivation. In France, for example, Parkinson’s is 8.5 per cent more common in the most intensive wine-growing regions compared to the national average.⁶ Consequently, the French government officially recognises Parkinson’s as an occupational disease among winegrowers.⁷ Studies in the United States and Canada, among other places, reveal the same pattern: in the examined regions, Parkinson’s disease is spread across the map like a patchwork quilt, and the areas with the most intensive farming practices – and the highest pesticide use – stand out most clearly in terms of the number of cases.⁸

It is virtually impossible to establish a definitive causal link in this type of “map-based study”. To do so would require a great deal of specific data: which substances were used, where and when? What is the residential history of the individuals who became sick in the area under investigation? What is their occupation? What did they eat? What is their genetic makeup? Are there other polluting activities in the area? The aim of such research is therefore not to establish or rule out an irrefutable causal link; it is about identifying a potential problem. In combination with other studies, the puzzle can then be pieced together more fully.

Although the scientific puzzle is not yet complete, the pieces that are already in place suggest that the explosive rise in Parkinson’s disease over the past decades can at least partly be attributed to exposure to pesticides. There is, for instance, a historical piece of the puzzle: the rapid post-war growth in Parkinson’s largely coincides with the period when pesticide use increased dramatically. In itself, this is not very convincing evidence, but together with the piece showing that the disease occurs more frequently in areas with intensive arable farming and high pesticide use, the picture changes. It becomes even clearer when you add the piece showing that farmers and gardeners in particular have a significantly increased risk of developing Parkinson’s.⁹

Therefore, contrary to what various agricultural organisations still regularly claim, the missing pieces of the puzzle do not so much lead to the question of whether a link exists, but rather to the question of exactly how strong that link is, and which specific substances are responsible. Scientists are also wondering whether there are substances that pose no risk individually, but can be dangerous in combination. This, in turn, raises other questions: what is the smartest way to investigate such “pesticide cocktails” without having to test an endless number of combinations? Are there genetic factors that increase the risk of harm following exposure to pesticides? Are there interactions between pesticides (or cocktails of pesticides) and other pollutants in the environment? And what is the situation with other neurodegenerative diseases, such as ALS and dementia, for which links to pesticides also exist?¹⁰

It has already been established that some specific pesticides, such as rotenone and paraquat, can damage the substantia nigra. This was not discovered during the official assessment of these pesticides but later in independent studies (and subsequently they were withdrawn from the European market). However, this type of research has not been carried out on the vast majority of substances, let alone for pesticide cocktails.

A recent large-scale study has found that trifluralin and tribufos, two pesticides frequently used in combination on cotton plantations in the United States, do not pose a proven risk for Parkinson’s when used individually. When used together, however, they prove to be highly damaging to dopamine-producing brain cells, suggesting that they can indeed cause Parkinson’s in combination.¹¹ This highlights the importance of taking pesticide cocktails into account in the authorisation process, and placing this topic high on the research agendas of independent scientists in relation to both Parkinson’s and other conditions.

Lack of action

According to Bloem, the way the risk of Parkinson’s is handled in the authorisation procedure violates the precautionary principle. “Given all these clear links, should we say that we are only going to ban this rubbish once it has been irrefutably proven that they cause Parkinson’s? Or, with all the evidence that already exists, should we say that we are only going to re-authorise the substances once it has been proven that they are safe? In reality, what happens is the former, meaning the burden of proof has been reversed.”¹²

The way the risk of Parkinson’s is handled in the authorisation procedure violates the precautionary principle. 

Bloem is not calling for an immediate ban on all pesticides. He does, however, advocate for subjecting the substances that are already authorised to a special Parkinson’s test as soon as possible. And as far as he is concerned, this should become standard practice when new pesticides are assessed. To this end, a testing procedure must be developed that makes it possible to look inside the brains of laboratory animals following prolonged exposure. There, it must be determined whether the substantia nigra has been damaged – for example, by counting the number of dopamine-producing cells. In the near future, it should be possible to carry out this procedure without subjecting animals to testing, by isolating the relevant cells outside their bodies.

The weedkiller glyphosate seems to be the most appropriate substance to first undergo testing for a link to Parkinson’s disease. It is by far the most widely used pesticide, and everyone is exposed to it to a greater or lesser extent. Moreover, several studies suggest a link between glyphosate and the development of Parkinson’s. The evidence, though far from conclusive, gives neurologists more than enough reason to be on alert.¹³ In addition, an increasing number of studies are emerging that show that even low doses of glyphosate can lead to disruptions in the gut flora.¹⁴ Such disruptions in the microbiome might – indirectly – increase the risk of Parkinson’s due to the communication between the gut and the brain. Researchers suspect that these disruptions could lead to a change in the structure of alpha-synuclein, a protein essential for communication between nerve cells. In mice, it has been established that this altered protein can reach the brain, where it subsequently damages the substantia nigra.¹⁵

Notably, the Dutch pesticide authority, the Ctgb, supported Bloem’s call for the speedy development of a Parkinson’s test. The November 2020 presentation was a wake-up call not only for the neurologist, but also for the Ctgb itself. This was evident in the fact that a few months later, in March 2021, the Ctgb wrote a letter to the agency responsible for pesticide risk assessment in the EU – the European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA – asking it to facilitate research into the development of an adequate testing procedure for Parkinson’s.¹⁶

The EFSA could not ignore this appeal by the Ctgb. Not only is it one of the leading national authorisation bodies with which the EFSA cooperates, but also, in its appeal, the Ctgb explicitly referred to Bloem – internationally renowned and known to frequently pop up in the international press to voice his concerns. Bloem’s message and extensive media reach have made many people in the pesticide world – from regulatory authorities to pesticide manufacturers – quite nervous.¹⁷

The EFSA responded just two weeks later with a proposal to organise a working conference “to take stock of the situation from a scientific and multidisciplinary point of view”.¹⁸ But over a year later, as I learned during my conversation at that time with Bloem at the Parkinson’s Centre of Expertise, that conference was yet to happen. Bloem could not contain his frustration. “How on earth do you explain to future generations – with a disease that is skyrocketing and an environmental role that seems so obvious – that we are not taking more decisive action?”

Breakthrough and disappointment

Six months later, however, on 8 September 2022, Bloem was again in high spirits. The conference that the neurologist had been pushing for over the past two years had finally taken place.¹⁹ In the presence of the EFSA and an international panel of experts, he was able to share his concerns about the authorisation procedure and Parkinson’s disease. And this had yielded results. All 49 attendees – experts affiliated with the EFSA as well as external research institutes and national authorisation bodies – reached an agreement. This is a rare occurrence among such a large group of international, often independent-minded experts. “There was broad consensus that the currently existing procedures […] offer an inadequate assessment of the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease in case of human exposure,” the minutes of the meeting state. The EFSA emphasised the urgent need to develop a new testing method that can actually provide insights into the risk of Parkinson’s. “A real breakthrough,” said Bloem. This was the first time that the EFSA had unconditionally acknowledged that the system it uses to assess pesticides was flawed.

The EFSA decided it would issue a call for tenders for a 3.5-million-euro contract aimed at the development of the required test. Specialised scientists were invited to submit bids.

The EFSA personally approached two Dutch research organisations with the request that they respond to this call: the Radboud University Medical Center (Bas Bloem’s employer) and RIVM, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. “That’s how strongly they felt about our case,” explained neurotoxicologist Harm Heusinkveld, who attended the conference on behalf of the RIVM. For years, toxicologists at the RIVM had also been worried about pesticides and Parkinson’s – concerns that were finally being taken seriously by the EFSA with this research call. ‘‘Afterwards, we thought: guys, something is really going to happen now.’’²⁰

This sense of urgency and enthusiasm felt by many researchers was heightened by the fact that the European re-evaluation of glyphosate was taking place at the same time. If the EFSA call for tenders were to be released quickly, there might still be an opportunity to use the weedkiller as the first case for the Parkinson’s test under development, perhaps even before the reassessment of the pesticide was completed.

Seven long months passed before the EFSA finally sent out the official Parkinson’s tender on 9 April 2023. But when he read the text, Bas Bloem immediately realised that something was wrong. “At the meeting, everyone was in complete agreement: we need to develop a good new testing method for pesticides and Parkinson’s. And then I read the call, in which the EFSA has made no money whatsoever available for such a new testing method. It was as if that conference had never taken place.” He lets out an audible sigh over the phone. His voice, so enthusiastic after the conference, is now filled with disbelief. Neurotoxicologist Harm Heusinkveld reacted with the same astonishment: “This is a huge mystery. I really haven’t the faintest idea how they arrived at this.”

The original intention was to develop a comprehensive Parkinson’s test in one go, based on the substantia nigra. But the promise made earlier by the EFSA to issue a research brief for this purpose was not fulfilled. The research brief set out in the call specifically concerned the development of a testing method focused on the mitochondria, the cell’s energy powerhouses. “But that test already exists, so you’d just be rehashing the same thing all over again. Besides, that test is far too limited,” commented Heusinkveld.

The Radboud University Medical Center and the RIVM were so taken aback by the research mandate that landed in their inboxes that they sent a joint letter on 17 July to EFSA Director Bernhard Url to express their disappointment. It is particularly noteworthy that a third party signed on to their objection: the Ctgb.

It is unusual for the Ctgb to hold a view that is at odds with an opinion of the EFSA. These two authorities, one working at the national level and the other at the European level, cooperate closely within the same legal framework. The letter, which came into my possession during an investigation into glyphosate for De Groene Amsterdammer, offers a rare glimpse behind the scenes.

“Specifically, we were disappointed as to what the call envisioned to achieve, considering […] the broad agreement that an ambitious and novel approach was required,” the three parties wrote. “We had the clear impression from the workshop that the EFSA had decided to move forward, but the recent call solely repeats steps that had already been taken earlier. […] The resulting testing strategy will not provide full insight in the potential of chemical substances to induce or progress [Parkinson’s disease].” In conclusion, the RIVM, the Radboud University Medical Center and the Ctgb stated that, “despite the explicit question and encouragement” from the EFSA, they would not be competing for funding for the proposed research.

A contested report

Four months later, in July 2023, the EFSA announced its recommendation to renew the authorisation for glyphosate for the maximum period of 15 years. Bloem was stunned, and he was not the only one. Scientists all over the world criticised the EFSA’s decision in a reaction that was unusually vocal for the scientific community.

Although during previous glyphosate authorisations the debate revolved primarily around the risk of cancer, this time concerns about Parkinson’s dominated. Ecotoxicologist Peter Leendertse succinctly summarised the essence of the many scientific comments on the re-authorisation: “If there are so many questions surrounding a substance, surely you cannot approve it for the maximum term? Extend it by two years if there is no other option, and in the meantime, ensure that you get clarity on the risk of Parkinson’s disease.”²¹

In an effort to calm tensions, the European Commission ultimately decided to reduce the maximum term from 15 to 10 years. As far as critics were concerned, this was little more than a token gesture. They pointed out that not only independent studies but also the EFSA’s own assessment report provided sufficient grounds for revoking the license altogether.

The glyphosate report runs to a total of 6,354 pages. What is striking is the large number of “data gaps” that are mentioned. The EFSA generally uses this term to indicate that knowledge is lacking and further research is required. Data gaps can thus influence the decision to grant authorisation and the potential duration of that authorisation.

The EFSA identified data gaps regarding the effects of glyphosate on gut flora, biodiversity and groundwater, amongst other things. However, none of these were considered “critical concerns”. That determination already made many scientists raise their eyebrows – but what the report says regarding Parkinson’s led to even greater surprise. There is no mention of a data gap anywhere in the passages on Parkinson’s disease, giving the impression that there is no lack of information on this topic whatsoever. On the contrary, the report’s conclusion is that current evidence “does not trigger a concern for parkinsonism”.²²

Although the EFSA acknowledged that risks of Parkinson’s could not be ruled out under the current authorisation procedure, the agency chose to ignore this conclusion in its glyphosate report.

“Absurd”, said ecotoxicologist Peter Leendertse. “Of course there is a huge data gap when it comes to Parkinson’s. Surely the report should mention that no reliable testing procedure exists. The findings of that conference are now simply being swept under the carpet.”

In short, although the EFSA itself acknowledged at the September 2022 conference that risks of Parkinson’s could not be ruled out under the current authorisation procedure, the agency chose to completely ignore this conclusion in its glyphosate report published the following summer.

The minutes of the September 2022 conference (which I obtained shortly afterwards) proving that the EFSA knows (and acknowledges) that a good Parkinson’s test does not exist have never been officially released. This is highly unusual – a considerable amount of information from comparable EFSA conferences is publicly available, ranging from advance announcements, participant names and meeting transcripts to complete video recordings. It is as if the much-heralded meeting in the late summer of 2022, attended by 49 international experts, including six EFSA staff members, never took place; as if the unequivocal conclusion regarding Parkinson’s was never reached.

Three EFSA staff members who attended the conference were also directly involved in the reassessment of glyphosate. Therefore, the assessors had first-hand knowledge of the discussions held during the conference regarding Parkinson’s disease and the lack of a sufficient test. Nevertheless, they did not include any of this in the dossier when the neurotoxicity of glyphosate was re-examined.

What makes the course of events even more peculiar is that during the re-assessment of glyphosate, the EFSA worked closely with the Ctgb. Alongside the national pesticide authorities of Hungary, Sweden and France, the Dutch authority was one of the responsible parties to which the assessment work had been outsourced. In other words, the Ctgb itself played a leading role in the decision to extend the authorisation for glyphosate for the maximum period. This is difficult to reconcile with the critical letters it sent to the EFSA during the same period: the first, dated 9 March 2022, requesting that EFSA Director Bernhard Url make room for research into a testing procedure for Parkinson’s disease, and a joint letter with the RIVM and Bas Bloem on 17 July 2023 complaining that the EFSA had broken its promise to make funds available for a Parkinson’s test.

It is as if there were two completely different Ctgb bodies. Whilst one was sending critical letters to the EFSA regarding Parkinson’s, the other was assisting the EFSA with the re-authorisation of glyphosate without raising any critical objections to the fact that the substance has not been tested for a link to Parkinson’s – even though such testing might be more urgent for glyphosate than for any other European-authorised pesticide.

The missing test

In a formal response to my questions, the Ctgb stated that a “very extensive data package” was available during the re-evaluation of glyphosate, containing “many more studies than merely the required ones”, including epidemiological research. While there may not be an adequate test to rule out Parkinson’s, said the Ctgb, the assessors decided that there was no cause for concern after studying a great deal of other supplementary information. “That is something different from being able to establish this with scientific certainty,” the Ctgb concluded.

The EFSA in turn denies that the conclusion regarding Parkinson’s disease reached at the conference has ever been its official position. The meeting was “merely informative” and should only be seen as “preparatory exchanges” for subsequent future tenders, the agency informed me shortly after the publication of the glyphosate report. EFSA also stressed that the assessment of glyphosate was carried out entirely “in line with the current legal framework”.

When I published the outcomes of the conference in De Groene Amsterdammer in September 2023, I received an angry email from the EFSA. The September 2022 meeting had not been a real “conference” at all, the message said, but merely a “procurement meeting”. And the outcomes of that meeting, the EFSA communications department emphasised once again, in no way represented the official position of the EFSA. “It’s a pity,” the email concluded, “[that you] decided to provide an angle which does not factually represent reality”.  

This reaction did not surprise me. By making information from the meeting minutes and the Ctgb’s letter to the EFSA public through my publication, the European pesticide authority was left exposed. After all, these documents prove that what the EFSA publicly states about Parkinson’s disease does not correspond with its own behind-the-scenes views on the matter.

What the EFSA publicly states about Parkinson’s disease does not correspond with its own behind-the-scenes views on the matter

The fact that the EFSA has neither publicly disclosed the conference’s conclusions nor included them in its assessment of glyphosate is, I suspect, essentially a legal strategy. If, following the conference, the EFSA had officially acknowledged that there is a gaping hole in the authorisation system, this would have provided the necessary ammunition for parties seeking to obstruct pesticide use. Invoking the precautionary principle in court is much easier if the shortcomings of the authorisation procedure regarding Parkinson’s disease are officially documented by EFSA itself. In that case, EFSA would be admitting that the risk of Parkinson’s disease “cannot be determined with sufficient certainty”, one of the basic conditions for invoking the precautionary principle.²³

Due to the lack of a Parkinson’s test, the risk of the disease cannot be completely ruled out in connection with any authorised pesticide. Officially acknowledging this on the record could throw the authorisation system – and with it the entire pesticide industry and the world of agriculture – into chaos. This would also happen if the EFSA were to officially acknowledge that the pesticide models it uses were not developed in a neutral manner.²⁴

When Bloem and the Ctgb sat down together in November 2020, both the neurologist and the pesticide authority realised that the authorisation procedure was flawed with respect to Parkinson’s. Three to five years: that would be the time needed to develop an adequate testing protocol, thought Bloem. “I think we need to do this together as soon as possible,” confirmed the then director of the Ctgb, Ingrid Becks-Vermeer, emphasising the need for a Parkinson’s test when I questioned her in 2022. She envisioned a development process lasting “a number of years”.²⁵

More than five years have passed since Bloem’s meeting with the Ctgb, and the EFSA conference took place three and a half years ago. The authorisation system still does not include a Parkinson’s test. Legally speaking, the EFSA may be able to defend this situation. The question, however, is how long they can keep up their defence in a society increasingly confronted with Parkinson’s disease.

This article is a lightly edited translation from Het pesticidenparadijs (“Pesticide Paradise”), an investigative book by Dirk de Bekker on the hidden world of pesticides, published by De Arbeiderspers in the Netherlands in January 2026.

1. Over the past few years, I have interviewed Bas Bloem on several occasions. Parts of these interviews have previously appeared in publications such as the podcast Red de Lente and the Dutch periodical De Groene Amsterdammer. See for example: De Bekker, D., et al. (24 January 2023). “Parkinson en pesticiden” [Parkinson’s and pesticides]. Red de Lente, season 2, episode 3. De Bekker, D. (25 September 2023). “De gezondheidsrisico’s van glyfosaat” [The health risks of glyphosate]. De Groene Amsterdammer. In this text, I draw on all the conversations held. Where necessary, I mention the date on which these conversations took place in the main text. ︎
2. Van der Gaag, B.L., Hepp, D.H., Hoff, J.I., Van Hilten, J.J., Darweesh, S.K.L., Bloem, B.R., and Van den Berg, W.D.J. (8 September 2023). “Risicofactoren voor de ziekte van Parkinson” [Risk factors for Parkinson’s disease]. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, 167. ︎
3. Su, D., Cui, Y., He, C., Yin, P., Bai, R., Zhu, J., Lam, J.S.T., Zhang, J., Yan, R., Zheng, X., Wu, J., Zhao, D., Wang, A., Zhou, M., and Feng, T. (2025). “Projections for prevalence of Parkinson’s disease and its driving factors in 195 countries and territories to 2050. Modelling study of Global Burden of Disease Study 2021.” BMJ, 388e080952. ︎
4. See for example: Bloem, B.R., Hoff, J., Sherer, T., Okun, M.S., Dorsey, R. (2021). “De parkinsonpandemie: Een recept voor actie” [The Parkinson’s pandemic: a call to action]. Poiesz Publishers. ︎
5. Opten, N., Wildenborg, F., Bolwerk, P. (2023). ‘Hoe het gifspook door de Betuwe waart. “Aan hun manier van lopen kun je zien dat ze het ook hebben.”’ [‘How the poison spectre haunts the Betuwe: “You can tell by the way they walk that they have it too.”’]. De Gelderlander. 3 November. 
   Folkerts, N. (23 July 2025). “Bestrijdingsmiddelen zorgen voor onrust in Drentse dorpen: ‘Op één dag zag ik vijf patiënten met parkinson’” [“Pesticides cause unrest in Drenthe villages: ‘In one day I saw five patients with Parkinson’s.’’]. Trouw. ︎
6. Kab, S., Spinosi, J., Chaperon, L., Dugravot, A., Singh-Manoux, A., Moisan, F., and Elbaz, A. (2017). “Agricultural activities and the incidence of Parkinson’s Disease in the general French population”. European Journal of Epidemiology, 32(3), pp. 203-216. ︎
7. Within the EU, in addition to France, Italy – and more recently Germany – also recognise Parkinson’s as an occupational disease. ︎
8. Barbeau, A., Roy, M., Bernier, G., Campanella, G., and Paris, S. (1987). “Ecogenetics of Parkinson’s Disease. Prevalence and environmental aspects in rural areas”. Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences/Journal Canadien des Sciences Neurologiques, 14(1), pp. 36-41.
   Hugh-Jones, M.E., Peele, R.H., and Wilson, V.L. (2020). “Parkinson’s Disease in Louisiana, 1999-2012. Based on hospital primary discharge diagnoses, incidence, and risk in relation to local agricultural crops, pesticides, and aquifer recharge”. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(5), 1584.
   Li, S., Ritz, B., Gong, Y., Cockburn, M., Folle, A.D., Del Rosario, I., Yu, Y., Zhang, K., Castro, E., Keener, A.M., Bronstein, J., and Paul, K.C. (2023). “Proximity to residential and workplace pesticides application and the risk of progression of Parkinson’s diseases in Central California”. The Science of the Total Environment, 864, 160851.
   After Het pesticidenparadijs was published,a Dutch study appeared showing regional clustering of Parkinson’s in the Netherlands, but no clear overlap with intensive arable farming areas was found. Although pesticide use and exposure were not taken into account, the authors suggested that the Dutch regional disparities “are not readily explained by known environmental indicators, warranting further investigation”. See: Simões, M., Peters, S., Huss, A., Darweesh, S. K., Bloem, B. R., & Vermeulen, R. (2026). “Incidence and spatial variation of Parkinson’s disease in the Netherlands (2017–2022): a population-based study”. The Lancet Regional Health – Europe, 62, 101565. ︎
9. Elbaz, A., Clavel, J., Rathouz, P.J., Moisan, F., Galanaud, J., Delemotte, B., Alpérovitch, A., and Tzourio, C. (2009). “Professional exposure to pesticides and Parkinson Disease”. Annals of Neurology, 66(4), pp. 494-504. ︎
10. See for example: Meerman, J.J., Wolterink, G., Hessel, E.V., De Jong, E., and Heusinkveld, H.J. (2022). “Neurodegeneration in a regulatory context: The need for speed”. Current Opinion in Toxicology, 33, 100383. ︎
11. Paul, K.C., Krolewski, R.C., Moreno, E.L., Blank, J., Holton, K.M., Ahfeldt, T., Furlong, M., Yu, Y., Cockburn, M., Thompson, L.K., Kreymerman, A., Ricci-Blair, E.M., Li, Y.J., Patel, H.B., Lee, R.T., Bronstein, J., Rubin, L.L., Khurana, V., and Ritz, B. (2023). “A pesticide and ipsc dopaminergic neuron screen identifies and classifies Parkinson-relevant pesticides”. Nature Communications, 14(2803). ︎
12. For more background information on this ruling, see: Darweesh, S.K.L., Vermeulen, R.C.H., and Bloem, B.R. (2024). “Paraquat and Parkinson’s Disease. Has the burden of proof shifted?”. International Journal of Epidemiology, 53(5). ︎
13. See for example: Bloem, B.R., and Boonstra, T.A. (2023). “The inadequacy of current pesticide regulations for protecting brain health. The case of glyphosate and Parkinson’s Disease”. The Lancet Planetary Health, 7(12), pp. e948-e949. ︎
14. Lehman, P.C., Cady, N., Ghimire, S., Shahi, S.K., Shrode, R.L., Lehmler, H., and Mangalam, A.K. (2023). “Low-dose glyphosate exposure alters gut microbiota composition and modulates gut homeostasis”. Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology, 100, 104149.
    Matsuzaki, R., Gunnigle, E., Geissen, V., Clarke, G., Nagpal, J., and Cryan, J.F. (2023). “Pesticide exposure and the microbiota-gut-brain axis”. The ISME Journal, 17(8), pp. 1153-1166.
    Puigbò, P., Leino, L.I., Rainio, M.J., Saikkonen, K., Saloniemi, I., and Helander, M. (2022). “Does glyphosate affect the human microbiota?”. Life, 12(5). ︎
15. Singh, Y., Trautwein, C., Romani, J., Salker, M.S., Neckel, P.H., Fraccaroli, I., Abeditashi, M., Woerner, N., Admard, J., Dhariwal, A., Dueholm, M.K.D., Schäfer, K., Lang, F., Otzen, D.E., Lashuel, H.A., Riess, O., and Casadei, N. (2023). “Overexpression of human alpha-Synuclein leads to dysregulated microbiome/metabolites with ageing in a rat model of Parkinson disease”. Molecular Neurodegeneration, 18(1).
    Silva, B.A., Breydo, L., Fink, A.L., and Uversky, V.N. (2012). “Agrochemicals, a-Synuclein, and Parkinson’s Disease”. Molecular Neurobiology, 47(2), pp. 598-612.
    Uversky, V.N., Li, J., Bower, K., and Fink, A.L. (2002). “Synergistic effects of pesticides and metals on the fibrillation of a-Synuclein. Implications for Parkinson’s Disease”. NeuroToxicology, 23(4-5), pp. 527-536. ︎
16. De Leeuw, J.F. (9 March 2021). Subject: possible relation between the use of specific pesticides and the development of Parkinson’s Disease. Ctgb, reference number 202103090024. ︎
17. See for example: Brzeziński, B. (2025). “Parkinson’s is a man-made disease”. Politico. 14 April. Bloem, B., Boonstra, T. (11 October 2023). “Glyphosate: ‘En tant que médecins spécialistes des maladies neurodégénératives, nous avons trois conseils à donner au ministre de l’agriculture Marc Fesneau’” [“Glyphosate: ‘As doctors specialising in neurodegenerative diseases, we have three pieces of advice for the Minister for Agriculture, Marc Fesneau’”]. Le Monde. ︎
18. Url, B. (n.d.). Subject/Re.: Possible relation between the use of specific pesticides and the development of Parkinson’s Disease. EFSA, Ref. ic2021-24570142. Although the letter is undated, the upload date provided by the Ctgb (23 March 2021) suggests that it was probably received two weeks later (and in any case no later than that). ︎
19. The following reconstruction is partly a reworking of my earlier research article in De Groene Amsterdammer, which was published on 25 September 2023. ︎
20. Quote from: De Bekker, D. (25 September 2023). “The health risks of glyphosate”. De Groene Amsterdammer. ︎
21. Ibid. ︎
22. Álvarez, F., et al. (2023). “Peer review of the pesticide risk assessment of the active substance glyphosate”. EFSA Journal, 21(7), paragraph 9. EFSA. (July 2023). Peer Review Report on Glyphosate, Part 3 of 6, p. 163. ︎
23. Commission Communication on the precautionary principle (2 February 2000), Document 52000dC0001, p. 3. ︎
24. Elsewhere in the book, I write about the pesticide models that are currently in use to calculate the distribution of pesticides through the environment. I conclude that these models, which form the basis of the authorisation system, were developed in close cooperation with the pesticide industry. ︎
25. Quoted from: De Bekker, D., et al. (5 June 2022). “The director of the Ctgb responds”. Red de Lente, season 1, episode 8. ︎

Recent polls and elections in the UK, New York City and Germany tell a story of polarisation: disappointed with the centrist consensus, voters are looking for alternatives to politics as usual. A focus on affordability could channel this discontent towards progressive options. 

For years now, the radical right has appeared to be the sole beneficiary of a strong anti-institutional, anti-political sentiment. For voters who felt betrayed by the status quo and ignored by the political class, the far right seemed to offer a visible avenue for protest. Or, in many circumstances, a lit match to take to the political consensus.  

However, the winds may be changing. Under the leadership of Zack Polanski, the Green Party of England and Wales has surged in popularity to more than double its 2024 election vote share. The Greens are mounting a formidable assault on the country’s political consensus on an unashamedly left-wing platform. At the time of writing, the party is polling at 16 per cent, a dead heat with Labour and one point below the Conservatives. Its campaign touts it as the strategic choice for those wanting to keep the far-right Reform UK out of power in the upcoming May local elections. Until recently, the UK was thought of as a two-party system.  

The 2025 German federal election also told a story of growing polarisation. The centre-right CDU/CSU (and, to a lesser extent, the outgoing coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, and Liberals) expected to lose voters to the far-right AfD, which recorded its best result to date with a 21 per cent vote share. What was surprising was the late surge of Die Linke (“The Left”), reportedly as a result of a viral TikTok campaign featuring its co-leader, Heidi Reichinnek. From polling at just 3 per cent one month before the election, the party more than doubled its 2021 result, winning 9 per cent of the vote. Since the election, Die Linke has continued to gain in popularity, and at the time of writing, is polling just 2 per cent below the Social Democrats. 

In the US, the New York City mayoral election provided another blueprint for the shift towards a more “fringe” left politics: Zohran Mamdani’s win over the Democratic old guard demonstrated the potent electoral appeal of a “services for all” platform. 

The insurgent left is finally a player in the polarisation game. Regardless of whether one laments the deterioration of legacy parties and institutional politics, that must be a better outcome than the far right holding an unchallenged monopoly on protest politics.  

Economic justice first 

Something powerful and, crucially, replicable that these campaigns have in common is a focus on left economic populism. They refuse to centre “culture war” issues and instead have adopted an unrelenting focus on affordability, trying to awaken class consciousness. They have each outlined a clear narrative of deprivation where the victim/hero is embodied by the working people, characterising large corporations and the mega-wealthy as the enemy. They propose “radical” economic reforms to expand the welfare state and transfer wealth, including rent reductions, a higher minimum wage, free public transportation, and heavier taxes on the wealthy.  

This platform proves effective for a few simple reasons. First, affordability remains on average the number one thing on European voters’ minds. Second, people (at least in Western European democracies) more or less agree on what’s to blame: elite collusion and government mismanagement. This story is easier to tell from the left than from the right.  

According to research carried out by Mandate, the organisation I work for, in August 2025,¹ left-wing economic populism has the potential to be a consensus platform.  

The cost of living “crisis” has hardly followed the temporality of a typical short-term shock. It’s been around for a while. The cost of living overtook health as the public’s number one concern in Europe in the wake of the pandemic sometime in 2021. This was first picked up by the Winter 2021 Eurobarometer survey, where it was one of the top two concerns for 41 per cent of respondents. The “crisis” had already been listed as the top concern for the EU overall since the spring of that year.  

In 2025, the inability to afford basic necessities remained the most pressing concern for both men and women (though slightly more so for women), and across all age groups except those aged 75 or older ². This was hardly a surprising result. We’d seen the cost of living top the most important issue tables in every country we surveyed for years; it did again in our most recent cross-country survey in March 2026. Nor were we surprised by voters’ growing pessimism about their country’s trajectory. The 2025 survey showed that half of all voters thought their country was moving in the wrong direction. In some cases, this number had increased substantially since we last asked this question three months earlier (by as much as 8 per cent in France).  

The hardship was palpable, and the resentment directed. When we asked respondents what was “most to blame for high inflation in recent years”, a majority in six out of eight countries pointed the finger at the political class and their mismanagement of the economy ³. 

What the numbers tell 

When Europeans are asked to define a successful economy, their vision is strikingly left-wing. Far from the early 21st-century neoliberal consensus, their priorities suggest that the hallmarks of a flourishing society are in communal stability and the strength of the state.  

A significant 34 per cent of voters define success as an economy that can fund quality public services for all, while 33 per cent prioritise secure employment. These features of the European post-war social democratic movement are consistently prioritised over neoliberal totems; only 16 per cent of voters view global leadership in technology as an economic priority, and 14 per cent believe rewarding entrepreneurship is a top-tier goal.  

The data also suggests that the public does not instinctively view low migration as a good economic indicator, with only 18 per cent ranking it as a feature of a successful economy. This indicates that the far right isn’t as successful at linking high migration to high inflation. 

Another clear finding from the survey concerns attitudes towards progressive taxation. Higher taxes on the wealthy are often resisted by free market logic, which states that, if faced with a wealth tax, billionaires will take their business elsewhere. Most Europeans don’t buy this theory. When asked which statement comes closest to their views, the majority of the public believes that higher taxes on the wealthy will give them exactly what they want – better-funded public services – rather than triggering capital flight.  

We also evaluated the diverse narrative frameworks Western governments currently use to address the cost of living and housing crisis. Messaging ranged from far-right, anti-immigrant framing to technocratic and centrist positions (“We just need to build more homes!”), right capitalist small-state arguments, through to overtly left-populist framings.  

The overall winner, with a net approval of over 50 per cent in all countries, was the left economic populist message. This message frames the cost of living as a conflict between “working people” and “billionaires”. Its policy imperatives to cut grocery prices and bring down rents speak directly to real, material changes for working people and the instant transfer of wealth from property owners and large megacorporations to the working class. These policies mirror the Mamdani playbook, and are popular even when not delivered by the dimpled man himself. 

There’s room on the board for the Left to define a political enemy on their own terms. And there’s a clear candidate for the role: the uber-wealthy.  

A more traditional market-liberal message about investing in businesses and reducing barriers to trade is also highly competitive. While voters want systemic change, they are not necessarily “anti-business”. On the other end of the spectrum, centrist triangulation touting legacy politicians as the “grown-ups” in the room delivering systemic change receives far less universal support. As does linking green energy to long-term economic growth targets. Voters want to see real change in the price of their everyday lives, and they want to see it yesterday.  

Interestingly, not every statement that punches up towards “elites” cleans the board. In fact, explicitly populist messaging bookends the spectrum of best and worst performers. While the left-populist proposition that explicitly offers billionaires as the enemy of the working class is favoured by consensus, a similar statement message framed in far-right populist terms – where the “elite” conspiracy is to prioritise immigrants over native-born people – is the least universally popular message in all surveyed countries (except Romania, by 1 percentage point).  

When talking about the cost of living, immigrants aren’t an effective scapegoat. While voters care about immigration deeply – it’s their second most important issue on average (see Figure 1) – they aren’t forming a knee-jerk association between high immigration and the cost of living despite elite messaging. This remains true even when messaging frames immigration as aligned with elite interests. Voters simply aren’t buying that there’s a link between immigration and inflation. There’s room on the board for the Left to define a political enemy on their own terms. And there’s a clear candidate for the role: the uber-wealthy.  

The opening for an insurgent Left 

The data further suggests that the economy is unclaimed territory in the current party landscape. We asked voters to pick, from a list of issues, what they think the main “progressive” party and far right party in their country “cares about” the most. The coordination and message discipline of the far right, and the disorganisation of the institutional left, are laid bare in the results. While the far right has a clear and dominant issue profile – they care about immigration above all, but are also the party of security and crime reduction – progressives are floundering. The most chosen response is either that the respondent doesn’t know what the progressive party in their country stands for, or that they stand for “none” of the salient issues. “Social security” and the “cost of living”, once the bread and butter of the social-democratic movement, come in a weak third and fourth. 

According to respondents, high inflation is primarily a consequence of political incapacity, where leaders want to help but are unable to, and political indifference, where they possess the means to act but choose not to. In each country, we see that politicians suffer from a perception of indifference rather than impotence on the cost of living.  

A belief that parties are trying but failing to make things more affordable is tricky to overcome, but not terminal: they can blame technical limitations or pass the buck to the private sector. But indifference is a death sentence. When voters believe you have the ability to help them but are choosing not to, frustration turns to anger, and, as we have seen in the recent waves of anti-incumbency, they take their vote elsewhere.  

In this climate, credibility on the cost of living would have to come from outside the system. And the ultimate outsiders – the far right – are also stumbling in this important issue space. There is a huge hole in the issue space begging to be filled, and a clear mandate from voters as to what they want to see fill the gap.   

Facing the far right 

The era of radical-right dominance over anti-establishment sentiment may be reaching a structural limit. Cost of living remains a persistent priority for the European electorate. And, while legacy parties are paralysed by a perception of institutional indifference and the far right remains laser-focused on immigration, a significant opening has emerged for an insurgent left.  

Voters are clear on the type of economy they desire. They want quality public services and secure employment prioritised. They’re seeking bold messaging framing redistribution as a necessary transfer of wealth to fund the social contract. They’re rejecting centrist rhetoric that serves as a veil for inaction, and aren’t willing to lay the blame at the feet of migrants.  

There is a rare opportunity here to (re)define and (re)own an issue that actually matters to voters. Left economic populism does appear to be a consensus platform, allowing challenger left and green parties to grow their base. Here may be an opportunity to challenge the far right’s grip on voter frustration, and channel anti-institutional sentiment leftwards.  

1. In the following countries: France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, UK.  ︎
2. Where concerns were divided between the cost of living, immigration, and healthcare. ︎
3. The exceptions are Germany and Sweden, who still laid a lot of the blame on the Ukraine war. ︎

The Russian state nuclear enterprise Rosatom has become the most active exporter of nuclear technology in the world over the past decade. Wherever the corporation operates, it presents atomic energy development as indispensable for climate action and national sovereignty. Yet beyond building reactors, Rosatom establishes an integrated model of political and societal influence, often entrenching censorship and eschewing democratic oversight.

When Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom signs an agreement to build a nuclear power plant, it exports far more than turbines, containment domes, and fuel assemblies. Alongside engineering contracts and state-backed loans comes a broader ecosystem: educational programmes, public diplomacy platforms, youth initiatives, science centres, cultural partnerships, and communication strategies designed to shape how nuclear energy is perceived.

Over the past decade, Rosatom has become the most active exporter of nuclear technology in the world. Its reactors are under construction across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. But its expansion cannot be understood purely in terms of energy capacity or industrial success. Rosatom has evolved into a vertically integrated actor that offers governments a full package: construction, financing, fuel supply, operational management, training, and long-term service agreements. Embedded within that package is something less visible but equally strategic: soft power influence.

In many host countries, nuclear cooperation is accompanied by programmes aimed at cultivating “public acceptance,” shaping youth perspectives, and aligning local institutions with Rosatom’s long-term presence. In political environments where civic space is limited or fragile, this model can intersect with authoritarian governance structures, narrowing public debate and marginalising dissent. Rosatom presents its activities as supporting development, sovereignty, and clean energy. Critics argue that its approach often produces long-term dependencies – technical, financial, and political – while reshaping the civic landscape around major infrastructure decisions.

Weak independent oversight

Rosatom actively promotes itself as a global leader in corporate social responsibility. It highlights awards for sustainability and transparency and emphasises adherence to international anti-corruption standards. Its official narrative presents nuclear energy as a driver of national modernisation and energy independence.

Yet a closer look at where Rosatom operates reveals a pattern. Many of its flagship international projects are located in countries governed by authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes, or in states with severely constrained civic space. These political environments are not incidental. They are often conducive to large-scale infrastructure agreements that require limited public debate, minimal parliamentary oversight, and restricted independent review.

In Hungary, the Paks II nuclear project has been framed as essential for energy security. Early public protests were dispersed, and critics have long argued that the project advanced without meaningful public consultation. Despite tensions between Russia and the European Union following the invasion of Ukraine, Paks II has continued under sanctions exemptions, illustrating how deeply embedded nuclear agreements can complicate broader geopolitical positioning.

In Turkey, the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant is being built under a build-own-operate model, granting Rosatom long-term operational control. Workers protesting conditions at the site have faced police intervention, while environmental activists opposing the project have been arrested. Public access to detailed safety and financial information remains limited.

Many of Rosatom’s flagship international projects are located in countries governed by authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes, or in states with severely constrained civic space.

In Kazakhstan, public hearings on proposed nuclear expansion have reportedly restricted critics’ participation. In Bangladesh, the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant has been accompanied by allegations of corruption and concerns raised by civil society groups about emergency preparedness infrastructure. Rosatom has rejected corruption allegations and, in some cases, threatened legal action in response to claims.

The most extreme case is Ukraine. During Russia’s occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, employees were detained, interrogated, and reportedly subjected to coercion and abuse. While this situation is not directly comparable to commercial nuclear projects abroad, it underscores how nuclear infrastructure can become entangled with state power in coercive contexts.

Across these cases, one pattern recurs: nuclear projects often advance in environments where independent oversight is weak and dissent carries political risk.

Manufacturing Public Acceptance

Rosatom’s strategy does not rely solely on executive agreements. It systematically invests in shaping public narratives around nuclear energy. In multiple countries, memoranda of understanding include commitments to “form a positive public attitude” toward nuclear power. Around project sites, Rosatom supports networks of aligned NGOs, expert councils, grant initiatives, and public forums that present themselves as platforms for dialogue and consensus.

The messaging surrounding these projects often follows strikingly similar patterns across different regions. In Hungary, the Paks II project has been promoted as “key to Hungary’s energy future” and essential for “energy security”. In Turkey, the Akkuyu plant has been framed as a step toward “technological sovereignty” and “new energy for a powerful Turkey”. In Bangladesh, the Rooppur project is regularly justified through the language of “energy independence” and the claim that development “cannot happen without nuclear energy”. Similar narratives appear in Kazakhstan, where nuclear expansion has been promoted as a “path to stability”, and in Egypt, where the El Dabaa project is framed as a matter of “national pride” and a source of “clean electricity”. In Rwanda, nuclear cooperation has been described as a way of “leapfrogging to modernity,” while in several African states cooperation agreements are presented as tools for national development.

Large-scale events such as Atomexpo, World Atomic Week, and regional nuclear forums position Rosatom as a convener of global legitimacy. These gatherings feature government officials, regulators, and industry-aligned experts discussing nuclear energy as indispensable for climate action and national sovereignty. Independent environmental organisations and critical voices are often marginal or absent, while company-aligned NGOs and expert councils that operate under the language of dialogue, sustainability, and climate action are fully supported. Initiatives such as “Mission Impact” are presented as inclusive platforms bringing together youth, experts, and industry leaders to shape a sustainable future.

This narrative framing is consistent: nuclear energy is presented as clean, modern, and essential; alternatives such as decentralised renewables, energy efficiency, or demand reduction are rarely foregrounded. Over time, repetition across multiple forums and countries can create the impression of an emerging global consensus.

Rosatom’s Information Centres on Nuclear Energy (ICNE) represent another layer of this strategy. By 2026, 27 such centres operate across Russia and partner countries including Bangladesh, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and Egypt. These centres function as high-tech educational spaces offering interactive exhibits, science competitions, youth festivals, and virtual plant tours.

Officially, they are designed to promote science education. In practice, they embed nuclear energy within local narratives of modernisation and progress. By linking atomic technology to national pride and technological sovereignty, they help transform complex industrial agreements into symbols of national achievement.

Exporting governance practices

Critics argue that Rosatom exports more than nuclear hardware. It also exports governance practices. Large-scale nuclear projects require centralised decision-making, restricted information flows, and strong executive coordination. In democratic systems with robust oversight, such projects can face lengthy public scrutiny. In more centralised systems, they can move forward with fewer obstacles.

Where civic space is limited, opposition to nuclear projects can be framed as anti-national or anti-development. In Bolivia, legal frameworks have restricted the operating space of NGOs critical of extractive and infrastructure projects. In Egypt, public protest around major state projects is effectively banned. In Myanmar, nuclear cooperation agreements have been signed under military rule, including memoranda referencing the promotion of a positive public attitude. Rosatom has signed cooperation agreements with nearly 20 African countries, the majority of which have repressive governmental systems.

The interplay between nuclear expansion and constrained civic environments raises questions about whether the technology’s governance requirements reinforce existing authoritarian tendencies. While Rosatom does not create these political systems, its projects often align comfortably within them.

Building a generation of atomic advocates

Youth engagement is perhaps the most forward-looking component of Rosatom’s soft power strategy. The corporation funds scholarships and educational programmes that bring students from partner countries to Russia to study nuclear engineering and related disciplines. Participants receive technical training, internships, and access to professional networks that frequently lead into Rosatom-linked projects at home.

Within Russia, the Rosatom Corporate Academy and youth science competitions cultivate early identification with the nuclear sector. International youth forums such as the International Youth Nuclear Forum in Obninsk and the BRICS Youth Energy Summit reinforce this professional pathway.

Rosatom has also extended its presence into global youth policy spaces. Representatives associated with Rosatom-supported initiatives have organised and participated in side events at the United Nations Economic and Social Council Youth Forum and during UNFCCC climate conferences. In these arenas, nuclear energy is framed as central to sustainable development and decarbonisation.

Such engagement is presented as empowering young leaders. Yet it also embeds nuclear advocacy within influential international platforms where youth participation carries moral authority. Over time, this may help normalise a particular model of energy transition – one in which centralised, state-backed nuclear infrastructure plays a dominant role.

Rosatom’s global expansion is not simply an industrial story. It is a political and societal one. By combining reactor construction, state-backed financing, fuel supply, long-term operational control, narrative management, and youth engagement, Rosatom has built an integrated model of influence. In many partner countries, this model operates within political environments where public scrutiny is limited and dissent carries risk.

Rosatom’s global expansion is not simply an industrial story. It is a political and societal one.

Nuclear energy projects, by their nature, create decades-long commitments. When those commitments are bundled with soft power instruments – public information centres, aligned civil society platforms, elite training pipelines, and international forums – the result is not merely energy infrastructure, but institutional alignment.

As nuclear energy regains prominence in global climate discussions, the governance dimension of these projects deserves equal attention. The question is not only whether nuclear power can reduce emissions, but how decisions are made, who shapes public understanding, and what forms of political dependency accompany the technology.

In the case of Rosatom, reactors are only part of the story. The rest is built through influence carefully constructed, globally networked, and designed to last as long as the plants themselves or even longer.

This article originally appeared on the website of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung as part of a dossier marking 40 years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It is republished here with permission.