You Don’t Get It!

You Don’t Get It! – A Plea for Our Generation

By Fine Hornbostel and Karla Machalett

Conscription, rampant rents, crumbling schools, with growing social inequality and the climate crisis looming on the horizon – and anyone who protests gets branded a “violent mob.” While conservative politicians warn of left-wing extremist escalation before anything has even happened, young people’s actual concerns barely make it past a footnote. A look at the media discourse around the October 31 youth protests – and who really benefits.

Those who keep telling us young people to take responsibility for the future need to be willing to listen when we actually demand that responsibility. Democracy, after all, doesn’t just mean we get to vote once we turn 18. It also means young people’s interests, concerns, and demands are taken seriously before frustration curdles into further resignation. When young people turn away from politics, disappointed, many in politics wonder why we’ve lost our enthusiasm for democracy.

In a democracy, there’s supposed to be equal opportunity, but Germany is one of the countries with the most billionaires in the world – surpassed only by the US, China, and India. Inequality in Germany is growing, while social mobility is becoming ever harder. What happens to a democracy and a society when sustainable living conditions can no longer be guaranteed, when it’s mainly the wealthy who prevail in politics, and when one’s wellbeing depends less on one’s own effort than on one’s parents’ assets?

Maybe someone should just explain to us again that there’s hardly a more livable country than Germany.

Of course we know that Germany is still better off than other countries. And yet we, like many young people, are left with the impression a teenager put so precisely to Chancellor Merz at the ARD town hall: “Why should I fight for a country that doesn’t fight for me?”

No one doubts that young people in Germany are privileged compared to young people in other countries. Still, that objection misses the actual point: the question is what future was promised to us, what future is actually still open, and, above all, who gets to decide that. The fact that others have it worse doesn’t make our own problems any less real. And the fact that a country is wealthy today is precisely not a guarantee that its future is secure – especially when safeguarding that prosperity and wellbeing only applies to a specific part of the population.

Youth Protests Across Europe

It’s remarkable how much political attention and media coverage is currently focused on the question of supposed violence at the youth protests across Europe. In Germany too, politicians are already stirring up sentiment against the protests announced for October 31st – even though the initiative “Gen Z regelt,” which called for the protests, has itself stated clearly that it rejects any form of violence. The focus on this supposed violence pushes our generation’s legitimate concerns into the background, without even acknowledging them.

It’s mainly centre-right and right-of-centre politicians – and yes, tellingly, only men – who are conjuring up visions of violent escalation. Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) warns of the “left-extremist scene” and “foreign members” who will supposedly hijack the protests. Baden-Württemberg’s Interior Minister Manuel Hagel (CDU) speaks of a “violence-prone mob” and announces plans to “strike back with the full force of the rule of law.” Hesse’s Interior Minister Roman Poseck (CDU) makes clear that police will be “strongly positioned” and will “tolerate no violence whatsoever against people or property.”

But how likely is it, really, that things will escalate in Germany the way they have in France? Large, nationwide waves of protest in Germany have famously left the streets looted and devastated in the past (hello, irony). Who doesn’t remember the violence-prone mob at the Fridays for Future and Brandmauer protests? It’s obvious that we have a different protest culture than France.

And is it a coincidence that, once again, young people are being reduced to not just one but two enemy images: left-wing extremists and foreigners?

A Media Smokescreen?

In France, those prone to violence are a small minority that the large protesting majority itself does not identify with. And yet the framing of “violence-prone left-wing extremists” currently dominates the discourse to a significant degree.

The consequences of this narrative shouldn’t be underestimated. Not only does it preemptively legitimize and normalize police violence against demonstrators – it also criminalizes demonstrators, who are merely exercising a constitutionally guaranteed basic right.

But there’s more to it than that: the media and political campaign currently running against young people also prevents potential solidarity from “adults.” And it isn’t just us who are troubled by these concerns and getting involved – the fact is, many parents and grandparents are also worried about their children’s and grandchildren’s future. Incidentally, they also make up the demographically larger group of potential voters, both in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. But who would want to show solidarity with a looting, violence-prone, radical mob?

To what end are leading politicians and media stirring up sentiment against the youth protests? Is it to prevent older generations from engaging more closely with young people’s concerns?

How convenient it is for politicians, the media, and the rest of the population to focus on the supposedly violence-prone, radical left. That way, no one has to find real solutions for rising costs of living, cuts to education, health care, social services and culture, social inequality, the climate crisis, and conscription. These are, incidentally, taken directly from the “Gen Z regelt” position paper.

Whose Violence?

We too are against violence, like most of our generation. But portraying young people as a threat to public order, instead of engaging with the reasons they’re taking to the streets in the first place, is also a form of violence – one that divides our society and the generations, and thereby endangers democracy.

The question is why a generation that should still have so much future ahead of it nonetheless doubts that this future will actually be better for them. Rising rents, education systems starved by budget cuts, social inequality, and an escalating climate crisis are problems that simply cannot be answered with batons, tear gas, and warnings about the next violence-prone mob. That is not what “democracy capable of defending itself” was meant to mean.

The Right Benefits

Even worse is that the narrative of supposedly aggressive, enraged teenagers plays directly into the hands of authoritarian and right-wing forces, both in our own country and elsewhere. How convenient, if the European Union’s democracies are ungovernable and going up in flames. No wonder Trump and Putin are gleefully prophesying Europe’s downfall, even conjuring up the end of Western civilization! And what is the AfD doing? Once again, they’re quick to insist that they’re the only ones who truly care about people’s social problems – even though their party platform proves exactly the opposite.

A look at history shows that it has, time and again, mainly been young people who exposed social injustices and fought for change: the White Rose against National Socialism, the ‘68 movement for democratization, emancipation, and against the Vietnam War, the young protesters in the GDR, the early Greens pushing for more environmental protection in the Federal Republic.

It’s obvious: we get it. Do you?