Saxony-Anhalt and the politics of growing up online

The polls ahead of Saxony-Anhalt’s September election are difficult to dismiss. Forschungsgruppe Wahlen’s survey published on 3 September put the AfD at 41%, against 23% for the CDU. Other recent polls also placed the AfD above 40%. These are voting intentions, not results, but they suggest a party competing to govern rather than simply to protest. (Polling overview, Wahlrecht.de)

What interests me is how this connects to the political environments in which younger people are growing up. Statewide polling cannot tell us how young people specifically intend to vote. It does, however, give us a reason to revisit the relationship between media, political visibility, and support for challenger parties.

In my master’s thesis at LMU Munich, I examined generational differences in media use and voting in the 2025 federal election, using the German Longitudinal Election Study. In my sample, 62.7% of respondents aged 18 to 28 identified social media as their most important source of political information, compared with 8% among those over 62. That is a substantial difference in where politics enters everyday life. (My thesis and research summary)

The more interesting finding was that the AfD’s association with social media was not confined to the young. Its predicted support among social media users remained comparatively elevated across the age range. Die Linke showed a clearer youth pattern. These are associations in observational data, and they do not establish that using a platform causes someone to vote for a particular party.

This also complicates the idea that an entire generation is moving to the far right. The official representative statistics for the 2025 federal election found that Die Linke led among voters aged 18 to 24 with 27.3%, while the AfD led among those aged 25 to 34 with 20.8%. Those are national results from a different election, but they show why treating young voters as one political bloc is misleading. (Federal Returning Officer)

My interpretation is that populist movements benefit when they make frustration politically understandable. They identify a people who have been ignored, an establishment to blame, and a promise to take control. Social platforms give those arguments opportunities to become familiar through repeated encounters. Familiarity can make a party feel like an ordinary political option long before someone decides to support it.

That does not make AfD and Die Linke voters interchangeable, or their parties equivalent. It means established parties should take seriously the possibility that their authority no longer arrives automatically with their name.

Saxony-Anhalt’s polls are a warning about that authority. Reaching younger voters requires being present where they encounter politics, but it also requires giving them something credible to encounter. A better video cannot compensate indefinitely for a future that feels unavailable.