Consensus and conflict, often viewed as polar opposites, coexist at the core of Europe’s Gen Z politics. Ask a young European about their politics and you will hear answers that sound like contradictions: higher taxes on banks, but stricter borders; more public spending on mental health, but deep distrust of the politicians who promise it. In 2024, Palumba surveyed over 170,000 voters across all 27 EU member states, and the data reveals why these positions are not contradictory at all. Gen Z is less defined by ideology than by a single organising preoccupation: managing exposure to vulnerability. This new political logic operates across three axes: how risk is distributed, who bears responsibility for managing it, and where the boundaries of solidarity are drawn.
The Consensus
Economic fairness
Having come of age amid successive economic shocks, Gen Z’s priorities bear the mark of accumulated instability. The Palumba data confirms this pattern: across all 27 member states, agreement on higher taxes on bank profits is among the generation’s strongest and most consistent positions (figure 1).
This is not a call for revolution. It is closer to what political scientists call social democracy: “a more moderate version of the doctrine (socialism), which generally espoused state regulation, rather than state ownership, of the means of production and extensive social welfare programs” (Britannica, 2026). A 2025 report by Infra4NextGen captures the mood precisely, describing “wider concerns about rising living costs, housing affordability and limited opportunities for their generation’s upward mobility”. For Gen Z, economic policy becomes a primary tool for managing collective risk. The desire for fairness and stability is not ideological for its own sake, but rooted in reducing the exposure of the generation to financial shocks and uncertainty.
Certain value shifts help explain the growing support for bank taxes, fair wages, and social protection: following the 2008 financial crisis, young Europeans placed greater importance on values that “emphasize social stability” (Sortheix et al., 2019, p. 15).
Mental Health
The same logic shapes Gen Z’s approach to mental health. Figure 2 demonstrates that when asked whether there has been “too much focus on mental health in the public debate recently,” young Europeans, alongside older generations, strongly disagree. For Gen Z, poor mental health is a systemic risk: the European Parliament briefing on World Mental Health Day 2025 warns that digitalisation and climate anxiety are converging into a “perfect storm”. The demand for public investment in mental health services is therefore continuous with the demand for bank taxes or climate regulation.
A November 2025 WHO/Europe report found that one in seven children and adolescents lives with a mental health condition and suicide remains the leading cause of death among people aged 15–29 across the region.
The European Union has begun translating this consensus into concrete steps: the Commission has mobilised €1.23 billion for 20 flagship initiatives.
Climate action
Growing up amid rising temperatures, extreme weather events have made climate change are perceived as immediate and personal. The Palumba data reveals strong opposition, across all generations, to the idea that economic growth matters more than climate action (figure 2). The latest Eurobarometer survey found that 85% of Europeans view climate change as a serious global threat and 38% of Europeans feel personally exposed to climate-related risks.
For Gen Z, climate is an existential risk, one they will live with long after older generations are gone. Support for collective intervention, regulation, and financial sacrifice follows naturally: when the threat is systemic and long-term, only systemic responses are regarded as adequate.
The Conflicts: Where Generation Z Divides
Immigration
Immigration is the clearest point at which Gen Z’s consensus around protection begins to fracture along two distinct lines. The first is economic: in a generation defined by housing scarcity and precarious employment, while the second is cultural.
Data from the TUI Stiftung “Young Europe 2024/2025” report signals a profound shift: “Migration and Asylum” has emerged as one of the most critical issues for young Europeans. Between 2022 and 2025, the proportion of young people favoring stricter immigration limits has risen sharply across the continent. The most dramatic shifts are observed in Poland, where skepticism increased from 23% to 51%, and Spain, which saw an increase from 22% to 44% (figure 3).
In fact, the lived experience of immigration in a country like Sweden, where acceptance rates for immigrants of a different race are among the highest in Europe (88.4% in 2023), contrasts sharply with that in Hungary (13.7%) (RF Berlin, 2025; Eurostat, 2024).
Beyond concerns about jobs and welfare systems, immigration is also regarded as a potential threat to national identity, cultural norms, and social cohesion. As Leruth et al. (2024) note, this cultural dimension can translate into demands that access to welfare be conditioned on integration, language acquisition, or adherence to social norms
Researchers describe this phenomenon as welfare chauvinism: support for a strong welfare state combined with restrictions on who can access it, whether through temporary limits, cultural conditions such as language acquisition, or requirements to adhere to social norms.
The boundaries Gen Z draws around solidarity are expressions of triage: when protection feels finite, its recipients must be prioritised. This is welfare chauvinism as perceived necessity: a rationing logic applied to the welfare state under conditions of scarcity.
The Gender Divide
Beneath the tension over welfare and immigration lies a second, deepening fault line: gender. Analysis by John Burn-Murdoch (Financial Times, 2024) indicates that Gen Z is the first European generation in which young men and women are moving in distinctly different ideological directions. In countries like Germany and Poland, young women are trending toward greater liberalism, while young men increasingly embrace right-leaning platforms. The “Youth Study SEE 2024/2025” further highlights this divergence, revealing that young men perceive higher levels of economic and cultural threat, particularly in relation to labor markets.
Palumba data makes the shape of this divide concrete (figure 4). Women agree more on every social and bodily autonomy question: trans rights (+0.73), abortion rights (+0.59), NGO migrant rescue (+0.65), while men agree more on every question framed around boundaries and resource competition: immigration restriction (-0.62), prioritising economic growth over climate (-0.75), nuclear energy (-0.77).
What appears as ideological polarisation is, at a deeper level, a divergence in the perceived locus of risk. Both responses are internally coherent: they differ not in their underlying risk-management logic, but in which threats that logic is applied to.
Gen Z at the Ballot Box
A generation preoccupied with risk management should, in theory, be highly motivated to vote. Yet the 2024 European elections told a more complicated story. Turnout among eligible voters under 25 fell to 36%, down from 42% in 2019 (Foundation for European Progressive Studies, 2024). The 2019 surge, driven by the climate movement and peak street-protest energy, proved a one-time spike rather than a permanent shift.
Participation, in this sense, is conditional: it rises when political offers credibly address the risks Gen Z faces, and retreats when they do not. The falling turnout of 2024 is a verdict: the risks that define this generation’s daily life are not yet appearing on the ballot with sufficient credibility to compel a response.
The Map: Where Generation Z Stands
If plotted on a traditional political map (figure 5), Gen Z occupies a seemingly contradictory space: “left-wing” on bank taxes and mental health, “green” on climate urgency, yet increasingly “right-wing” or protectionist on immigration. The contradiction is an artefact of the lens, not the data. Mapped instead through a framework of Protection vs. Exposure, the pattern becomes coherent: Gen Z consistently favours whichever position minimises its vulnerability.
This political logic can be mapped across three interrelated dimensions:
- The Distribution of Risk: There is a generational consensus that the era of individualist “neoliberalism” has failed. Whether it is taxing banks to stabilize the economy or funding mental health to stabilize the psyche, Gen Z supports mechanisms that shift risk away from the individual and toward the collective.
- The Locus of Responsibility: There is a consistent preference for institutional actors to act as the ultimate “guarantors of stability.” This is not necessarily an ideological love for big government, but a pragmatic demand for a safety net in a precarious economy.
- The Boundaries of Solidarity: This is where the map fractures. While there is a shared desire for a “fortress of stability,” there is no agreement on who is allowed inside the walls.
Conclusion
The political map of Europe’s Gen Z is not in the familiar colors of left and right. On economic fairness, mental health, and climate action, the generation speaks with a single voice: the state must protect, regulate, and invest. That is the consensus. But on immigration and gender, the same search for security produces fracture. Young Europeans agree on the need for protection, yet they disagree on who deserves it – and whether young men and women even face the same threats. This generation judges policies by their consequences. A policy that reduces exposure to instability wins support. In this sense, the 2029 elections will not be won on ideological loyalty: Gen Z has little of it. They will be won on credibility: which parties can convincingly claim they will contain costs, stabilize institutions, and define the limits of solidarity without destroying it.
