Remember Matteo Renzi? In May 2014, The Guardian asked if the then 39-year-old centre-left Italian prime minister was “the man to save Europe’s soul?” Turns out he wasn’t even the man to save his own job. By the end of 2016 he became just another name in an ever-expanding list of former Italian leaders.
Signor Renzi was, in fact, just the prototype for a slightly younger generation of millennial leaders (born in the 1980s) who have fundamentally weakened the traditional political parties they were supposed to rescue. These one-time saviors invariably depart with their parties internally fractured, shorn of public support and often embroiled in focus-sapping debates about personal judgement and suitability for office.
Rather than ushering in a new era of hip, social media savvy leaders — the experience of former Prime Ministers Sanna Marin (Finland), Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand) and former Deputy Prime Minister Luigi di Maio (Italy) illustrates a whole different reality.
Honestly, why do millennials keep failing at political leadership?
Here are five possible reasons.
The first is that many millennial leaders view themselves as “influencers” rather than “politicians.” They are unable to comprehend a real world existing beyond their social media bubbles. It’s why Sanna Marin quickly signed up with a “talent agency” to create “content” following her swift political exit. This overreliance on TikTok and Instagram mistakes “followers” for actual voters and ensures they continue to sing the same song to the same audience over and over and over again.
But, it also belies a lack of understanding about the importance of reaching (and compromising with) new voters in non-digital settings. Even in tech savvy Finland — less than 19 percent of the population use Instagram, with only 8 percent on X (formerly Twitter). That’s a lot of analogue voters written off as old and irrelevant.
After all, who doesn’t love countless “likes” from their best friends and minions?
Second, is that this governing by video clip has resulted in a weird blurring of the lines between their personal and professional lives. It’s part of a wider maniacal focus on media control and brand curation which keeps coming back to bite them where it really hurts — their private lives.
So, while Sanna Marin rightfully felt aggrieved at videos of her partying leaking online, she seemed oblivious to the bigger issue. Namely, why a significant proportion of the Finnish population were not enamored watching their prime minister behave like an unburdened student.
And while there was a definite gendered element to some of the criticism of Marin, this cannot overshadow the fact that like countless actors, musicians and royalty before them, millennial leaders are still failing to understand the basic tenet of mobile technology — every action is a target when you are willingly playing the game.
This leads directly into the third reason. Obsessed with profiles, mentions and visibility, these millennial leaders are burning themselves out on the hamster wheel of prioritizing “content creation” over actual policies. And this exposes their disinterest in the hard constituency-level work which sustains political organizations (and leadership support). Instead, they favor the personalization of party structures with them at the apex of one gloriously self-perpetuating echo chamber.
They fail to understand that not every meeting can be a media soundbite, not every decision requires an Insta story.
This in turn feeds into the associated fourth reason: a lack of resilience for dealing with electoral defeats or political setbacks. Millennial leadership invariably leads to election defeat. But that’s not even the worst problem. Faced with years of opposition politics and the need to rebuild, revitalize and rewire their political parties, ex-millennial leaders prefer to desert the ship completely, rather than even attempt the required refit.
This lack of durability has significant political implications. It means these established parties are constantly having to restart under new leadership almost every electoral cycle. Millennial leaders leave behind no discernible strategies for either policy or party development.
Their millennial leadership was, in effect, simply all about them.
Fifth, and perhaps most fundamentally of all, this coterie of millennial leaders has displayed no consistent political ideology. So while Jacinda Ardern’s final speech in the New Zealand parliament highlighted her commitment to climate change, tackling the loss of biodiversity, human rights and the rights of minorities, gender equality and social justice, it was a speech that really could have been delivered by any recent millennial political leader.
Alas, this laudable but totally Shangri-la vision of how politics operates seems to be a shared millennial worldview. It also, unfortunately, does nothing to solve the day to day problems facing real voters.
Jacinda Ardern generated headlines around the world for her leadership. Yet, New Zealand’s property crisis (and the startlingly high levels of inequality it generates) continued unabated. And while Luigi di Maio once proudly led Italy’s anti-establishment, online Five Star Movement promising everything from guaranteed incomes, lower taxes, earlier retirement and more secure employment contracts — his dalliance with the real world of government resulted in his resignation as party leader within two and a half years.
Given the increasingly accepted corrosive effects of social media on young people, the factors weakening millennial political leadership are likely to worsen in the coming generations. Who knows, maybe the Americans (and their boomers clinging to power) aren’t so crazy after all.
Eoin Drea, Ph.D., is senior researcher in the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, a centre-right think tank working across the European Union.