French youths don’t vote but that doesn’t mean they don’t care

PARIS: They may not head to polling stations for France’s presidential election today but it doesn’t mean they don’t care.

“We are called disengaged, depoliticised, but it’s just that we get involved differently,” said Loic Frohn, 19, who rejects the cliché that French youth are selfish and indifferent.

Backing his view, studies show high levels of civic engagement among the country’s younger population despite a tendency to neglect politics.

Frohn grew up in a working-class suburb of Paris and says he is motivated by a desire to fight for “equality, diversity and solidarity”.

He works in a civil service programme that pays youths aged

€ between 16 and 25 around 600 (RM2,832) for a six- to 12-month mission.

Participants typically make home visits to pensioners and help handicapped people with sporting and cultural activities.

Frohn also became an ambassador of the programme, visiting schools to persuade others to take part. Last year nearly 100,000 people took part in these programmes, nearly tripling enrolment in just two years.

“They say we are not active perhaps because of (low) voter turnout rates,” Frohn said.

“But rather than vote for people who don’t necessarily reflect our values, we instead project our values ourselves, through our actions,” Frohn added.

In France, abstention rates are highest among older and younger voters, with the younger population counting the lowest proportion of registered voters.

During the last French presidential election in 2012, nearly one registered voter out of five (19%) under the age of 25 did not vote – one-and-a-half times the abstention rate (13%) of the overall population.

Last month, half of 18- to 25-yearolds questioned for several polls said they plan to skip voting in the country’s two-stage presidential election this Sunday and May 7. “Defiance towards the political system is overwhelming,” said Anne Muxel, a sociologist who works on the French part of the Europeanwide survey Generation What.

Among the 20,000 in that survey, 87% do not have confidence in politics and 99% consider politicians more or less corrupt. “This does not mean that young people no longer believe in political activities”, or are apathetic, she added.

“There is a strong propensity toward direct democracy and protesting,” said Muxel, noting a majority of young people have high confidence in humanitarian organisations. Studies show French youth are increasingly involved in civil society.

Just behind Iceland, young French people are the most active in volunteer work in Europe, according to the 2012 quality of life survey by Eurofound.

In 2016, 35 percent of respondents to a survey by the Credoc research centre volunteered at least intermittently, up from 26% the previous year. — AFP