Why gen-Z men are turning far right and women far left

This graph shows how, during Germany's latest federal election,

young men predominantly voted for the populist, far right AfD party.

On the other hand, the populist left, D-Link and BMW parties

far outperformed the center, left, right and far right parties with young women.

This is no isolated incident.

It is part of a major trend.

For example, here in South Korea, young women rapidly are turning to the far

left and men, after years of leaning left, are now sharply turning to the right.

Similarly, in the Netherlands, UK and US, young men have propelled populist right

previously old boys clubs like reform UK, the Dutch Freedom Party

and Trump's MAGA movement to incredible election victories.

So what is going on?

Why aren't NZ women turning to the populist

left and men to the populist right?

To answer that question,

I've turned to the scientific literature on populism, where, despite there

being plenty of examples of how populists either became autocrats like Putin

or how they ruined their economies like Chavez and Maduro did in Venezuela.

I did not start by just assuming populism is always bad.

I also wanted to find out whether or not it actually makes sense to lump left

wing populist like Bernie Sanders and Britain's Jeremy Corbyn

in the same category as a right wing populist like Trump and Farage.

But before getting into all of that, I first want to go back

to the most fundamental question of them all, which is

what is populism?

Where the first insight I got from the literature is that, strikingly,

in the 1990s, social scientists typically considered

populism a Latin American phenomena.

But as this graph for populist parties in Europe clearly

shows, while support for 1: far left, 2:

populist, far left, 3: middle of the road populist 4: far right populists

and 5: far right parties was indeed pretty low in the early 1990s, about 10%.

It has now surged to around 30%.

But okay, hold on the far left, far left populist, regular populist, far right.

Populist, far right. Not populist.

If we truly want to understand what Gen Z is voting for,

I think we need to be super clear about what these categories actually mean.

We need to go beyond the typical political negative takes,

like populists are radical extremists, or positive