Youth make their voices heard in British eleciton.

Anger over nation’s ‘Brexit’ vote sends young voters to polls

LONDON — As Britain took stock Friday of the stunning results of a snap election that wiped out the parliamentary majority of Prime Minister Theresa May and her governing Conservative Party, one narrative bubbled up to the surface: The youth had spoken.

The election results were fueled partly by a higher turnout rate among young ‘British’ voters who had long been angry at the results of the referendum last year to leave the European Union, known as Brexit. That vote, overwhelmingly supported by older Britons, was seen by many younger people as a threat to their jobs, their ability to study abroad and their desire to travel freely across the bloc’s borders.

In other words, the vote by young Britons on Thursday had a whiff of payback.

“I was so angry about Brexit that I buried my head in a pillow and screamed,” said Louise Traynor, 24, a waitress in the southwestern district of Battersea in London.

Shaking her head in frustration, Traynor said she had been angry at herself because she hadn’t bothered to vote the first time around.

The Brexit referendum, Traynor said, could lead to closed borders, which threatened to tear her long-term Spanish boyfriend away from her, and her away from the group of European friends she had made while working at a tapas restaurant.

On Friday morning, she said, much of the anxiety she had felt about her future was replaced with excitement when she realized that her vote for the opposition Labour Party had denied the prime minister a mandate.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour gained 31 seats, while May’s party lost 12 seats and its overall majority — leaving a hung Parliament, one in which neither side has enough lawmakers for control. In a statement Friday, May grimly announced that she would form a minority government with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.

Traynor said Corbyn’s campaign had “injected energy” into what seemed like a stale election that would bring more “doom.”

Owen Jones, an author and Labour campaigner, wrote in The Guardian on Friday that young voters had been “ignored, ridiculed and demonized, even. They just don’t care about politics, it’s said, or they’re just too lazy.”

He added, “Our young have suffered disproportionately these past few years: student debt, a housing crisis, a lack of secure jobs, falling wages, cuts to social security.”

Many young Britons felt compelled to vote after the Brexit decision, because of austerity budgets and what they saw as the establishment’s tendency to serve the interests of the rich. This year saw a spike in young people registering to vote — more than 1 million people under 25 applied.

On the day in May the election was called, 57,987 people younger than 25 registered to vote — more than any other age group, according to the BBC. About 246,480 young people registered to vote on the last day in May that they were eligible, a significant increase from the 137,400 who did so on the cutoff date in 2015, The Telegraph reported.

The turnout in constituencies with younger voters rose significantly, appearing to benefit Labour. The turnout for 18- to 24-year-olds was 66.4 percent, according to Sky News data. Other reports put it as high as 72 percent. In the 2015 general election, the rate for voters of the same age range was 43 percent, according to Ipsod, a marketing and opinion research company.

There were doubts that younger voters would cast their ballots for Corbyn, who had toured the country, attracting crowds of all ages. His campaign was even compared to Bernie Sanders’ U.S. presidential race. In a Twitter post Friday, Sanders congratulated Corbyn for “running a very effective campaign.”

In Battersea Park, students ages 19 to 21 said they hoped May would be removed as leader of her party.

“She’s an embarrassment to the country,” said Fiona Barry, 20, a student at Queen Mary University in London. “England deserves so much better than that.”