New Delhi: With UK’s general elections a day away, the Boris Johnson-led Conservative Party is touted to win a majority even as its lead has shrunk.
According to YouGuv’s latest opinion poll, Conservatives are expected to win 339 seats with a 43 per cent vote share while the Labour Party looks set to bag 231 seats with a 34 per cent vote share. A hung parliament is a possibility, like in 2017, but there’s another reason why Conservatives shouldn’t be too confident.
Back in June 2017, Conservatives lost their majority and the Labour party did unexpectedly well. Labour’s gains were attributed to the large voter turnout among young people under 30.
This phenomenon was called a ‘youthquake’, a term first coined by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland in 1965 for the way young culture inspires fashion. In 2017, however, it took on a new meaning in the UK to reflect political awakening among millennial voters.
Ahead of Thursday’s polls, voter registration showed a 38 per cent surge in people who have signed up to vote as compared to 2017 and two-thirds of them were under 35. Considering this and predictions of a hung parliament, a repeat ‘youthquake’ could become a concern for Conservatives.
What happened in 2017
In the June 2017 elections in the UK, the Conservative Party was expected to have a landslide victory but fell 8 seats short of a majority after securing 13 seats less than its 2015 tally.
The Labour party was also short of a majority but won 30 seats more than in the previous election.
The results — and the suggested ‘youthquake’ phenomenon — were possibly seen in Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign. He had targeted youth issues like tuition fees and rising rent prices, and increasing youth turnout was part of the campaign strategy. Young British voters also had an air of resentment for the then-incumbent Conservative government and were still reeling from Brexit.
Not entirely accurate
However, sceptics aren’t entirely certain that the ‘youthquake’ was as much an electoral phenomenon in 2017 as it was a social one. They argue that the concept is built on three major assumptions.
First, older people are more likely to vote than younger people in the 18-24 age group. According to BBC, this “has always been the case in Britain and other countries”.
Second, “Labour was more popular among young people than old people in 2017”.
Third, opinion polls can predict voter turnout accurately. The BBC report points to different figures quoted by different polling organisation during the 2017 polls — some had said youth voter turnout went up by 16 percentage points while others said 12 points. It was also argued that while constituency-level data supported the phenomenon, the relationship wasn’t straightforward.
Other ‘youthquakes’
In New Zealand, ‘youthquake’ took on a different meaning in 2019 local government elections where droves of young people started entering politics at city and district levels.
These posts were commonly held by officials who were ‘older, white and male’ and 90 per cent of them were above 40.
In October, the number of elected officials under the age of 30 doubled from the last election, from 14 to 30. Also, the number of elected officials under 40 rose from 59 to 91.