Israeli social media star and leader of the Youth on Fire movement Hadar Muchtar, meets people at the Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem in the course of her campaign for the September 2022 parliamentary elections. GIL COHEN-MAGEN / AFP / picturedesk.com
In the 2020s, youth politics seems to be awakening globally. In Southeast Asia, millennials-based parties like the Future Forward Party in Thailand entered parliament. But in Israel, a new party “for youth by youth” failed to achieve a breakthrough in the most recent elections. Orel Beilinson returns to the origin of youth politics in 1820s Europe to show its resemblance with today’s iterations—and how they crucially differ.
One Friday in March, I was sitting at a café in Tel Aviv when a spontaneous demonstration formed in a nearby junction. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had fired his minister of defense a few minutes earlier. As the crowds grew from dozens to thousands, a friend called. “You are an expert on youth politics,” he said. “Where are the youth? Why is the National Union of Israeli Students not striking?” A month earlier, when I was in Graz for an archival research trip, a colleague handed me her phone. On the screen was a Facebook post by the Freedom Party of Austria’s youth wing in Carinthia calling to “halt Carinthia’s Slovenization.” And earlier, in September 2022, as I arrived at IWM, the talk in Israel, often mocking, was about Hadar Muchtar, the 21-year-old founder of a new party called Youths on Fire. Its website states that “Only the youth will care for the youth.”
Each of these anecdotes speaks to a different form of youthful participation in politics. Austria’s Slovenophobes are their party’s disciples. Its youth wing targets children as young as ten and adults as old as thirty, politicizing the former and offering political careers to the latter. The National Union of Israeli Students is also a petri dish for politicians. Its former leaders frequently align with a party and run for parliament. The union is their training ground: it is where they practice mobilizing voters, representing constituents, and serving as elected bureaucrats. But neither party youth wings nor student unions threaten adult politics. The former are ruled by parties, while the latter remain confined to university politics. In Israel, the union is only expected to intervene in national politics if student interests are jeopardized; its strikes were mostly limited to tuition fees.
Youth parties like Hadar Muchtar’s are rare. Another prominent example is the Malaysian United Democratic Alliance. The youth-centric party was founded in 2020 by Syed Saddiq, who had founded the Malaysian United Indigenous Party’s youth wing in 2016 and became a member of parliament and minister of youth in 2018.
Muchtar and Saddiq have attacked the political sphere as geriatric and lethargic. “We want to unshackle Malaysia from the type of politics based on money and power and refresh it with young people with the right heart, mind, and interests,” Saddiq has said. Muchtar said she wanted to replace “members of parliament who sat here for twenty years and did nothing” and who “burned down our future.” Her intended “revolution” more than threatened adult politics—it sought to upend it.
Harnessing Youth
Two centuries ago, the flame of youth power was kindled in Europe. Adam Mickiewicz, later regarded as Poland’s national bard, wrote an “Ode to Youth” at the University of Vilnius. The poem was ecstatically vague. It endowed youth with the power and responsibility to change the world. It did not yet matter who counted as youth and what this youth was to change. Mickiewicz’s secret student society was outlawed and disbanded, but the ode was copied and recopied. In 1830, when Polish cadets rose against the Russian Empire, its words appeared on walls throughout Warsaw.
That same year, in Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini grew disillusioned with his secret society. He was twenty-five, not much younger than Mickiewicz. The carbonari, whom he had joined hoping to free Italy from foreign rule, relied too much on France for his liking. His rupture with the carbonari’s leadership was, to him, generational. They were “men of the past,” while he represented “Young Italy.” They were not corrupt or idle, as Muchtar and Saddiq accuse politicians today. Their generation had brought about the French Revolution, after all. But it had since fallen “back into the mud from which it had wanted to rise.”
Mixing Mazzini’s agenda with Mickiewicz’s enthusiasm created a powerful tool for youth mobilization. Romantic poets, like Sándor Petőfi in Hungary and Johan Nybom in Sweden around 1848, kept writing similar hymns to the “Ode to Youth.” New young political activists kept dissenting from their parties. Denouncing the elite’s senescence allowed them to tie age and politics. They painted their programs as naturally deriving from birth cohorts and generational experiences.
For Mazzini, this formative experience was the French Revolution and Napoleonic rule. Muchtar points to the growing difficulties of Israel’s young adults in purchasing an apartment. The answer, she claims, is free-market liberalism. While this ideology is ordinarily associated with the political right, Youths on Fire’s platform states: “We do not believe in right and left” and “This is the ruling elite’s brainwash.”
The Problem of Generations
Here lies a significant difference between the 1820s and the 2020s. Muchtar’s adoption of economic liberalism differs from the nineteenth-century adoption of liberal nationalism. For Mazzini, Mickiewicz, and their successors, youth was a mighty stratum of a larger collective. They mobilized youth to redeem Italy and Poland. Muchtar asks youth to save themselves, and first she tried to convince young voters that they had joint problems. For her, this is not an energetic population to galvanize but rather an interest group. Her party sets out “to make the State of Israel good to youth.”
Such rhetoric has taken hold in other countries too. Adolescents marched in the streets of London holding signs that read: “I am thirteen, and Brexit steals my future.” This is also a common phrasing in youth climate protests, a movement ignited by the teenager Greta Thunberg. Pupils skip school to march, rally, strike, and fight for collectives like “the earth” but also for themselves. They fight for a cause they believe to be particular to them, as a generation, as young people.
Observers explain youths’ “eco-anxiety” and even their supposed “antiwork mentality” as products of a generational feeling that the world is crumbling. This feeling is exclusionary. While Mazzini disagreed with the carbonari, he envisioned an Italy free and democratic for all. He shared their problem. The radical version of the Gen-Z credo yields a sharper antagonism: the older generations partied at our expense.
No Pedocracy for Israel
Around 1900, some feared that the youths would overthrow the adults, their flames consuming Europe. Some warned of “pedocracy.” But this did not happen. In the two centuries since Mickiewicz and Mazzini, older people learned how to play safely with youthful fire. Politicians learned to harness its energy without being consumed by its radical flames.
As Sarah Pickard concluded about contemporary Britain, youth wings “tend to be sidelined and distanced by parent parties, but at the same time are expected to tow the party line.” Very few Austrians took the Freedom Party’s youth too seriously. The Constitutional Court of Thailand took the Future Forward Party very seriously and disbanded it after it received 17 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections.
In Israel, anxieties about real-estate prices won Youths on Fire 0.18 percent of the vote in the last elections—a clear failure for a party that promised that only youth could save youth in the era of youth. Perhaps Israel is not a good country for free-market enthusiasts (the Economic Freedom party, which has a similar ideology, got 0.33 percent). Perhaps Israel is not a good country for youthful fire. The last statement would have made more sense before the events of March, though. In the protests where my friends failed to see students, many chanted “you messed with the wrong generation.”
Generational flames kindle spontaneously. Although marketers, sociologists, and others monitor generations closely and continuously, such flames are hard to predict and control. To rekindle the extinguishing fire in Israel, Muchtar may want to study the original spark that ignited it in the 1820s. Mickiewicz, Mazzini, and their contemporaries mobilized and institutionalized youth. Their success made modern European politics.
Sarah Pickard, Politics, Protest and Young People (London, 2019), p. 225.
Orel Beilinson is a historian of Eurasia. He is currently completing his PhD at the Yale University. He was a guest of the IWM in 2022–2023.
