A journey of hopelessness: The young refusing to vote

There’s nothing new about old men in sharp suits with nothing new to say.

And there’s nothing new about young people not voting. Youthful idealism turns into adult cynicism, and we all have to play along sometime. Life beats the hope out of you, then you head to the polls.

In the 1960s, Hunter S. Thompson called politicians “actors who are too ugly to make it to Hollywood.”

As for the outsiders who oppose everything these actors stand for, Thompson dubbed the freaks, and that’s who young people want. And they always have. The freaks, the borderline-lunatics with something to say. Whatever it is, just something.

Young people will always be revolted by politicians who want to be digestible more than they want to change the world. But to be static is no longer digestible, or maybe that’s just my youthful idealism talking.

The election of Donald Trump is a prime example of this, so is the rise of far-right parties all across Europe. Whatever the far-right are saying these days, it’s something. Whether it's racist, fascist, genocidal, or sexist, it’s a vision. And that’s something.

That kind of clarity will always be more seductive than cautious ambiguity, even if extreme.

I spoke to a friend of mine, 20, an MCAST student, who, as I was already aware, plans to vote for Imperium Europa in the next election.

“They’re the only ones who are actually shedding light on the immigration problem,” they explained. “We’re going to become the next England, the next France, the next Sweden.”

They pointed out that the Labour Party seems to plan on exacerbating the situation, while the Nationalists refuse to address it. “This is not the Malta I want to live in, this is not the Malta I want my mother to live in.”

Now, a freak does not necessarily equate an authoritarian nutcase, but it does imply someone who has something real to say and who says it with balls. Malta hasn’t had a freak on the ballot in a while.

Instead, Malta has leaders who tread the boundaries of opinion, who give speeches to cameras in an empty stadium. Vote-thirsty politicians who would rather grant pardons than change laws.

The Labour Party seems to be stretching thin trying to maintain their tight grip on older voters, who remain unquestioningly loyal from the days of Mintoff, while teasing young voters just enough with semi-legal cannabis and a 15% rise in stipends. Have you seen the posters strategically placed right outside Junior College? There’s nothing like a cheeky bribe on your way home from school!

And you’d think these young voters would likely go for Labour, because at least Labour treads that boundary, whereas the Nationalists seem to mostly denounce the modern world altogether (apart from smartwatches), whether or not they have a shiny new leader.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

“If most young people didn’t vote, I think that would send quite a message,” a first-time voter with no intention to vote, told me. None of his friends have any interest in voting either, he confided.

“I don’t think my vote means anything,” they said, “but my lack of one does.”

And it is in this that young people’s faith lies. Not the politicians, or the NGOs, or even their own voice. My generation has founded its own silent rebellion, and our leaders are anyone who says something by saying absolutely nothing.

I spoke to a friend of mine, a 22-year-old and another MCAST student, who I knew had no interest in voting, and who I also knew plans to tell his loyalist parents he’s voting PL to avoid the trouble.

“I don’t know anything about this stuff,” he admitted. “They’re always lying to us so I never know where to start. I’d rather just not think about it.”

People my age have this unique sensitivity to bullshit. We were trained for it. Our Instagram feeds try to convince us that cows were found on the moon and that those photos from the Epstein files were AI. GenZ has been trained to constantly scan the world for deceit.

“Before you had Labour is Labour, PN is PN, now you’re either gonna address the reality or you’re a bullshitter and you’re establishment,” another young person, aged 20 and a musician, told me. He would vote, if he hadn’t left the country.

Giving out bonuses to compensate for the minimum wage, but never raising it. Issuing subsidies to address the housing crisis, but never regulating developers. But who cares, take €1,000 as you pass GO if you vote for a Labour government!

As an unlikely voter, I was excited to find out last year that the PN had chosen a young person as their leader. “How exciting!” I thought to myself. Sadly, Borg quickly killed my interest when I found out that the man cannot seem to wrap his head around the impact the US-Iran war will have on Malta, and that smartwatch thing too.

On the other side of the duopoly, Robert Abela lacks anything remotely resembling a personality. With nothing new to say and nothing real to stand for, he will most likely be re-elected prime minister, ushering in another five years of nothing. How exciting!

Then, once this month-long drunken bar fight is finally over, the tendency is for a party to hold a tight grip on their regime for over a decade, before they loop back around in some sort of pseudo-democratic game of musical chairs. And even then, the leaves change and the roots stay the same, so why not just lie back and live with it? By the time June rolls around the dirt is dry like sand, and not much seems to grow anyway.

The problem is, young people in the 21st century are too busy trying to cope with the seeming fact that the entire human race is poisoned beyond repair, and that’s a pretty daunting place to find yourself at the age of 17. So, we retreat into our online lives, and our drugs, our thriving techno-scene, and pretend that someday we won’t be 30-something living in a world moulded by whatever’s happening on this island.

The conclusion I’m coming to is that the only thing you can get my generation to agree on is that there’s nothing left to debate. Opposing everything and adding nothing, we have failed to find anything good worth fighting for. It’s a mutation of democracy, and it was built on hopelessness.

“When someone represents us, we show up,” someone told me, referencing Mamdani’s campaign in New York. “There’s a lot of hopelessness, but when someone decides to be honest, we show up. You need to give young people some hope because there’s none of it, man.”

But when there’s no one doing that, then what?

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