Young people face the general elections of next November 29 with access to housing, job stability and the impact of new technologies as the central axes of their concerns. These concerns will be taken to the ballot box through a vote strongly conditioned by their specific life situation and by the future expectations that each party is capable of offering them.
The Consejo de la Juventud Española (CJE), which brings together organizations such as Nuevas Generaciones del PP, Juventud Estudiante Católica or Juventudes Socialistas, identifies a set of concerns that are "agreed upon" among young people: housing, employment and digital consumption, as it details in its report "Between questioning and change. Young people’s discourses on democracy in Spain".
Along with these shared issues, the document points to other matters still in dispute within youth, such as feminism, immigration or the rise of the "far right".
Housing and employment, a wall for emancipation
The housing access crisis has become a cross-cutting problem for the new generations. The CJE analysis points out that this issue has "burst in with force in all groups without exception" and may even "end up conditioning educational pathways".
Added to this scenario is the feeling that having a job is no longer "enough" to take on the cost of renting a "dignified" home, or to accumulate the savings necessary to enter homeownership.
The latest data from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) place the average salary of those aged between 20 and 35 at 1,659 euros gross per month in twelve payments. At the same time, the Índice Inmobiliario Fotocasa sets the average rent of an 80-square-meter dwelling at 1,131 euros per month. This means that a young person would have to devote about 70% of their gross salary to rent, without including other basic expenses.
The CJE study emphasizes that it is not just a one-off economic obstacle, but a "barrier to building future projects" and to consolidating an independent adult life. The inability to achieve a "minimally stable adult life" is reinforced by the precariousness and instability that still characterize the youth labor market.
Young people’s vote and the economy: more expectations than macrodata
In this context, Ignacio Clemente, Deputy Director of Political Research at Sigma Dos, explains to Europa Press that young people tend to perceive housing, employment and expectations for the future "as a single matter." For this reason, they usually steer their vote less towards the detail of specific proposals and more towards the life horizon they believe each political force can open up for them.
"Housing, employment and expectations for the future tend to work as a single matter. Someone who shares an apartment at 28, strings together temporary contracts, or is thinking about going abroad tends to experience those situations as one: a life project that is put off," Clemente argues.
The CIS Barometer for October shows that housing is the main problem for 33.5% of young people aged 18 to 24 and for 33.4% of those aged 25 to 34. These are the only age groups in which concern about access to a home exceeds 25%.
According to Sigma Dos, among the young electorate, personal experience weighs more than the general situation of the economy. In other words, the voting decision is based on how they see themselves now and how they imagine their future, more than on the country’s macroeconomic indicators.
"Someone who has been in the job market for a short time has less background to assess and more expectations at stake: being able to emancipate themselves, saving money, or reaching a certain stability. To understand the young vote, it is important to cross that self-perceived well-being with their main concerns," adds Clemente.
The CIS data follow the same line: after housing, economic problems appear as the second major concern, and the quality of employment ranks fourth. This last concern is concentrated above all among those aged 25 to 34, a bracket in which 10.6% identify it as one of their main problems.
For the CJE vice president and head of the socio-economic area, Lucía Siles, there is "a very widely shared consensus when it comes to identifying the problems," but choosing a particular ballot paper does not depend so much on what difficulties are perceived, but on each young person’s reading of their causes and of who they consider responsible.
Digital health, infoxification and mental distress
The CJE report also brings to the forefront the discomfort related to the digital environment, information overload, and its impact on mental health. In the interviews, young people use terms such as "slavery" or "addiction" to describe their relationship with the Internet and social networks.
The Council highlights a specific derivative that affects the way they connect with politics and that they perceive as inevitable: the so-called 'infotoxification', that is, the combination of overinformation with disinformation.
"Young people regularly find themselves on digital platforms that are channels for information and political participation where information bubbles are created and where they are constantly invited, between quotation marks, to a somewhat polarized debate. But it is not that young people are more polarized, but rather that they relate in spaces where the political debate is currently generated," explains Siles.
New political spaces and assessment of leaders
In the opinion of the CJE vice president, young people are living through a "crisis of the material conditions of life" that has weakened their sense of political representation and has created the "perfect breeding ground" for the emergence of "new political spaces with a more populist character". Even so, Siles emphasizes that "many times" young support for these formations responds more to "an action of protest or punishment" than to a full adherence to their positions.
The data handled by Sigma Dos show that the leaders of PP and PSOE receive worse ratings among those under 30 than in the overall population. The PP president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, records among young people three tenths less than in the total, where he reaches 3.9 out of 10. The Government president, Pedro Sánchez, obtains half a point less than the national average, which is 3.2.
Meanwhile, the ratings of the leaders of Vox, Frente Amplio, and Podemos improve among young people compared with the overall average. Vox leader Santiago Abascal adds two tenths more than among the citizenry as a whole (3.3).
In the case of Frente Amplio’s candidate, Ada Colau, the youth score is half a point higher than the average of all age groups (2.9). And in Podemos, Irene Montero reaches a rating of 2.6 among those under 30, compared with the 2.4 that she gets in the total of society.