Bundestag election 2025: Why many young voters choose extremely

Hand on heart: Who knew Heidi Reichinnek until a few weeks ago? The Co-top candidate of the left should have a significant share in the fact that her party became the strongest force among voters under the age of 25 in the recent federal election. A good quarter of this group chose the left on February 23, 2025. Second place among young voters took the right -wing extremist AfD (around 20 percent). The Union parties, traditionally not attractive to young voters, also increase something compared to the election of 2021.

This result is not too surprising for political scientists. Experience has shown that young people often choose oppositional parties, explains the Paula Diehl, Politologist. In the Bundestag election in 2021, the Greens and the FDP particularly benefited from this tendency to voters, at that time there were clearly ahead among those under 25. But that alone explains the current election result in parts.

Many young people have the impression that their problems would not be taken seriously, explains youth researcher Simon Schnetzer at “Zeit Online”. As a result, political measures do not take their reality of life. The focus is on social and financial security as well as climate protection. And: A majority of young people wanted to counter the legislative pressure in politics, said Schnetzer.

These needs address these needs of young voters most successful in terms of content and also in terms of personnel. Heidi Reichinnek, 36, became a social media star. Within a few days and hours. Her “brand wall” speech of January 29, 2025 in the German Bundestag shot through the ceiling on social media such as Tikkok and Instagram, reached an audience of millions. Especially younger people. And that was by no means a coincidence, but the result of strategic media work: she collected 575,000 followers on Tikok alone, and it is approximately 500,000 on Instagram. And what Heidi Reichinnek publishes there can be considered to be in terms of life and credible for young people: For more than ten years, the Studied Middle East and Political Scientist in pedagogical youth welfare has been working for her Bundestag mandate since 2021.

According to scientific knowledge, media consumption alone is generally not the cause of the action of people. Media content can increase existing opinions and attitudes, as the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld was first able to show in 1940. A human train that political extremists have always taken advantage of. Last but not least, the AfD. Because: A tendency of some young people to legal international positions and parties is not completely new, as election analyzes have shown at the latest since the early 1990s. The fundamentally changed public, the role of social media is comparatively new.

The algorithms from Tikkok, Instagram, Facebook & Co provide particularly wide and constant distribution. This is exactly what the platform groups from the USA and China deserve their advertising money. Unlike editorial, journalistic media – these corporations largely reject responsibility for the widespread content. Hardly wonderfully that parties like the AfD have been focusing on social media very strongly for years and at the same time defaming journalistic media.

This strategy not only got caught by young voters, but in total in a total of 16 percent of all voters, i.e. with around every sixth adult citizen. You have to count to less than four to meet the left electorate in a circle 18- to 24-year-old. Purely statistically. This special count of the 2025 Bundestag election shows what is to be done politically and socially in the next few years.