Young voters stayed away from far-right parties and embraced the Greens and Left instead, while men overall tended to support radical right parties somewhat more than women, according to data aggregation of EU election exit polls by Europe Elects for Euractiv.
Europe Elects aggregated available data from eight countries, representing 61% of the EU’s population, to identify how different age brackets voted in June’s EU elections. The same aggregation was elaborated to identify voting behaviour per gender with data from six countries, representing 45% of the EU’s population.
Despite reports that in some countries young voters are fueling the radical right’s surge, like in Germany and France, the EU-wide data shows that young voters between 18 and 29 are the age bracket voting the least for parties belonging to the hard-right ECR or far-right ID groups.
Instead, radical right parties are the most supported among voters between 50 and 59 years old, with 25% of votes in that age bracket going to ECR and ID.
According to the data, young voters are the demographic group that votes the most for parties within the Greens or Left groups, accounting for 28% of votes in the 18-24 age bracket and 22% in the 25-29 section.
On the other side of the age range, 60+ voters are the most fervent supporters of the EPP and S&D. In the age bracket of 60 to 69, 20% of voters support the S&D and 22% the EPP. Among those from 70 years onwards, 24% supported S&D, and 27% supported EPP.
According to the data aggregation per gender, women tend to vote more for the Greens overall, with 10% of the women giving them their vote, against 7% of men. Contrarily, men tend to vote more for the hard-right ECR group with 13% of men’s votes going to that group, as opposed to 11% of women.
As for EPP, S&D, Renew, Left, and ID, men and women voted in almost identical proportions.
[Edited by Aurélie Pugnet]
*Infographics by Tobias Gerhard Schminke, Esther Snippe.