The Great Economic Amnesia of Europe's Youth

When a generation faces mounting public debt, crumbling economic prospects, and a stagnant future, one might expect a furious demand for individual liberty, deregulation, and competitive enterprise. Instead, Europe’s youth is demanding a tighter leash from the Leviathan. Decades of economic mismanagement and overreach by weak political leadership have produced an extraordinary reflex: the primary victims of state failure are demanding more state.

Nowhere is this ideological drift more evident than in Germany. According to data from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a staggering 60 percent of young Germans believe the government should take a far more active role in directing the economy. At the ballot box, this mentality translates directly into an embrace of political extremes. More than half of young voters backed parties on the radical fringes in recent elections, with young men leaning toward the AfD and young women gravitating toward Die Linke. Continental trends offer little comfort, as youth unemployment touches 20 percent in several European nations, and half of young Europeans no longer regard democracy as the best form of government.

Wolfgang Steiger, General Secretary of the CDU Economic Council, views this shift as a breakdown in the country's economic immune system. The underlying drivers—economic stagnation, rising national debt burdens, and pension schemes rigged against the young—are undeniable. Yet the prescribed cure is a dangerous delusion. Whether observing Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France or the AfD and Die Linke in Germany, the economic recipes of the extreme flanks remain identical: central planning, market intervention, and state control.

This creeping statism is increasingly dressed up in academic respectability. Left-wing economists promote concepts like an antifascist economic policy, arguing that market forces feed autocracy and that price caps are necessary social remedies. This logic fundamentally flips economic history on its head. When Ludwig Erhard lifted price controls after the Second World War, he dismantled the remnants of a state-directed command economy and established genuine competitive freedom. Substituting open markets with price caps and bureaucratic steering does not combat authoritarianism; it inevitably breeds it.

The mainstream political establishment has only itself to blame for this decay. By repeatedly adopting interventionist rhetoric to placate critics and demobilise opposition, established parties have shifted the political center so far that anyone advocating for free markets is routinely branded a radical. When state dependency becomes the default civic mindset, economic miracles become impossible. Can a society that forfeits its belief in individual effort and competitive enterprise ever expect to generate real prosperity again?

Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com