On the evening of October 17th, a peaceful march in Milan against the rising cost of living broke apart near the cathedral. Young people, many dressed in black and masked, threw bottles and fireworks at the police and built barricades. They returned the next day, smashing windows and looting shops around the Piazza del Duomo. Police detained at least a hundred and sixty people, about eighty percent of them minors. Rome announced it would send five hundred more soldiers to the city.
The commentary reached for familiar labels: hooligans, radicals, a lost generation. One Swiss report contained a detail that fits none of them. Many of the young people in the streets, it said, had no ties to any political party or protest movement. A Marxist account of the weekend, written by people with a cause to promote, adds that a right-wing rally two days later drew only a few dozen people.
This doesn’t square with the story that Europe’s young are simply drifting right. Look at Germany’s 2025 election. The youngest voters, aged 18 to 24, gave the far-left Die Linke 25 percent, the far-right AfD 21 percent, and the governing conservatives only 13. The young didn’t pick a side. They fled the center for whichever pole would name their anger. That anger has no party. It is up for auction.
A European Commission panel that met in Brussels last year helps explain why. It studied something darker than voting: how minors drift toward violent extremism of every kind. Most young voters are nothing like those cases, but the panel’s findings describe a way of arriving at politics that cuts across categories. It found the young moved less by doctrine than by grievance, assembling what researchers call “salad bar extremism,” a private belief system built from parts. The young, it noted, no longer just consume radical material. They make it themselves.
A teenager building a worldview from grievances and memes isn’t converting to a creed. He is trying to write his own story. What he wants first is authorship: to be the one who names what is wrong.
Now consider how the adults answer him. The Commission panel recommends treating radicalization as a public-health problem, a poisoning to be met with “social antibodies.” Italy’s government answered Milan with a new crime of violent participation in a demonstration, carrying two to five years in prison. Even the Marxist site that cheered the marchers promised in its headline to channel their anger, then invited them to join its party. These actors want very different things, yet each treats youth anger as a fluid that needs a pipe. The young person is a patient, a suspect, or a recruit. Never the author.
The pattern runs beyond Europe and beyond youth. In Brazil in 2024, app drivers, offered rescue when they wanted respect, took to the streets against President Lula’s plan to protect them. They had doubts about the math, but they also rejected the role of victim. The far right didn’t raise their pay. It called them heroes.
That is the far right’s real offer. It tells people their anger is correct, that it belongs to them, and that voicing it is rebellion. Rita Matias, head of Chega’s youth wing, told Euronews that young people sense “the counter-culture is increasingly to the right.” When the AfD relaunched its youth wing as Generation Germany, its leader promised a movement of optimism and confidence. While governments impose curfews, the far right speaks to teenagers in the language of hope.
The offer is a forgery, and the AfD’s own language gives it away. Alice Weidel called the new youth wing the party’s talent pool, and German intelligence was watching it within a week. The young man who thought he’d found someone to let him write his own story learns that the script was finished long ago and he has been cast as an extra.
Germany also shows the forgery can be beaten. One researcher told Al Jazeera that Die Linke won the youngest voters partly by building a strong presence on TikTok, meeting them where they were and making the case in their own idiom. The left won where it stopped lecturing and started listening.
The violence in Milan was real, and nothing about its causes excuses it. But treating every angry teenager as a public-order problem proves the far right’s point: the system fears you and won’t listen. More than seven in ten young Europeans worry about the cost of living, and 82 percent fear poverty and inequality. That isn’t poisoning. It’s an accurate reading of their lives.
The far right hasn’t won the street. In Milan it could barely fill a corner of a square. What it has won is the vacancy, the empty seat at every table where adults decide what to do about the young. The kids in Milan are still waiting for someone who will let them decide where the march goes.