“It’s happening,” Nigel Farage told Breitbart as the battle over social media intensified, revealing that his Reform Party enjoys a commanding lead across platforms by virtually every metric.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage praised the hard work and increasingly right-leaning thinking of Britain’s youngest voters, pointing to an increase in support since returning the party he founded to power just three weeks into the general election campaign.
“It’s happening,” he told Breitbart News. “Generation Z is very different to millennials. They’re much more ambitious and I feel a greater rejection of what’s being drilled into them in schools and universities. I’ve been back on the campaign trail for a few weeks now, and the most notable thing I’ve seen is an increase in voter turnout among 18-24 year olds, from 3% to 15-21%. [per cent] “It depends on which pollster you look at. Either way, it’s a very rapid progression.”
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Farage said the time when Thatcherism was the answer to the country’s problems is long gone, but he still feels that the ’80s spirit is still very much present among young people, who are more focused on success than the laid-back millennials. He added: “Young people are increasingly adopting an ’80s mentality. They’re ambitious, they want to own a home, they want a high-paying job. They turn up to my events and they’re all very well-dressed. It’s really interesting to hear millennials talking about work-life balance and all that. There’s a generational shift happening.”
Reform Party insiders have made it clear that at least some of the increase in younger support is due to the party making serious headway on social media, and that much of this growth appears to be organic. British broadcaster Sky News compared the performance of parties running in the general election this week and found that while Labour is spending more on social media than all other parties combined, Farage’s Reform Party actually gets the most page interactions by a significant margin.
of The report said While Labour spent £1.7 million ($2.1 million) on social advertising and received just over 500,000 interactions on its social media pages, Reform UK spent a fraction of that – just £26,000 ($32,000) – but received more than 1.5 million interactions on Facebook.
In other hints from social media interactions, the outlet claimed that 16 of the top 20 most “loved” Facebook posts by party leaders this election campaign belonged to Farage. A professor of digital politics consulted for the article told Sky: “Despite being one of the smallest and least organised parties, Reform dominates Facebook in terms of organic interaction. This could be due to the different numbers of followers the parties have, but Reform UK and Labour have roughly the same number of page followers, suggesting the Reform Party is more successful at generating responses.”
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Meanwhile, in the UK Left-wing Newspaper Parents Comparing British political parties’ performance on the Chinese-owned app has yielded similar results. Though the UK Parliament banned TikTok from its parliamentary network over security concerns, the app is still seen as a tool to reach an otherwise hard-to-reach Gen Z audience, making it a new battleground for political participation in this election.
Here again, Nigel Farage has the edge. The paper says Farage outperformed all other parties and candidates in the election, noting that while Labour can claim to post more frequently and get more views overall, Reformist posts are “their best-performing content, outperforming Labour in views per video by 30%.” Farage’s average post on TikTok reportedly performs twice as well as the average Conservative post.
While Farage’s British populism isn’t directly comparable to the populist parties now gaining momentum across Europe, his success in capturing the Gen Z vote is mirrored elsewhere. In Germany, for example, support for the Green Party, long the default political platform for young people, has fallen sharply, especially at a time when millennials were the youngest voting demographic. A poll earlier this year found the far-left Greens had lost 23 points, dropping them to fourth place among 16- to 24-year-olds.
The top two parties among young German voters are both right-wing, bucking the old paradigm: establishment conservatives and the populist right. In the US, Gen Z is increasingly supporting Donald Trump, according to Anhard. Suggest The sense of irony this generation has developed has spared them the pious indignation of older generations at Trump’s combative, unconventional style.
As Breitbart News previously reported, Trump is now on par with Biden among Gen Z, a stark shift in attitudes from just a few elections ago, when the youngest voters (then at the tail end of the millennial generation, now in their late 20s and early 30s) had shifted significantly to the left.
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