Widening Gen Z gender gap in global politics

New Straits Times

2 days ago

SOUTH Korea's young women are expected to lead a broad political backlash against the main conservative party at presidential elections next Tuesday, punishing it for months of chaos.
Multitudes of young men, though, are unlikely to join them.
In democracies worldwide, a political gender divide is intensifying among Gen Z voters, with young men voting for right-wing parties and young women leaning left, a break from pre-pandemic years when both tended to vote for progressives.
Recent elections spanning North America, Europe and Asia show this trend is either consolidating or accelerating, with angry, frustrated men in their 20s breaking to the right.
First-time South Korean voter Lee Jeong-min is one of them. He says he will vote for the right-wing Reform Party's candidate, Lee Jun-seok.
Lee, the candidate, vows to shut down the ministry of gender equality, speaking to an issue that resonates with men like Jeong-min, who resents that only men have to do military service.
"As a young man, I find this to be one of the most unfair realities of living in Korea.
"At the prime of their youth — at 21 or 22 years old — young men, unlike their female peers, are unable to fully engage in various activities in society because they have to serve 18 months in the military."
In South Korea, almost 30 per cent of men aged 18-29 plan to back the Reform Party compared with just three per cent of young women, according to a Gallup Korea poll this month.
Overall, more than half of the men back right-wing parties while almost half the women want the left-wing Democratic Party candidate to win. The divergence shrinks for older age groups.
Political economist Soohyun Lee, of King's College London, said many young South Korean men felt unable to meet society's expectations: find a good job, get married, buy a home and start a family.
And they blame feminism, many believing that women are preferred for jobs.
In South Korea and other democracies, Gen Z men are seeing an erosion of their relative advantage, especially since the pandemic — to the point where in a few countries the gender pay gap among 20-somethings favours young women.
European Union data show one of them is France, where men aged 18-34 voted in larger numbers for Marine le Pen's far-right party than women in last year's legislative elections.
In Britain, where more young men than women vote conservative, males aged 16-24 are more likely to be neither employed, nor in education than female counterparts, official data shows.
In the West, young men blame immigration as well as diversity programmes for competition for jobs.
In Germany's general election in February, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a record 20.8 per cent of the vote, tugged along by an undercurrent of support from young men — though the leader of the party is a woman.
Men aged 18-24 voted 27 per cent for the AfD while young women ran to the other end of the political spectrum, voting 35 per cent for the far-left Linke party.
The gender divide is not restricted to Gen Z, voters born since the mid-to-late 1990s. Millennials, aged in their 30s and early 40s, have felt the winds of change for longer.
In Canada last month, men aged 35-54 voted 50 per cent for opposition conservatives in an election turned upside down by United States President Donald Trump's tariffs.
The Liberals, which were bracing for defeat, rode an anti-Trump wave back to power, thanks in large part to female voters.
Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, which promised a manufacturing renaissance and attacked diversity, resonated with young white and Hispanic men, but turned off young women.
So how does the Gen Z war end?
Pollsters said it could drag on unless governments addressed core issues, such as home affordability and precarious employment.
"If the future generation is ever so divided along the lines of gender and refuses to engage with each other to build social consensus, I do not think we can successfully tackle these huge issues," Lee, of King's College, said.