Europe Talks 2024: United in fear about their future

When Luca Riccioli looks out of his window, he sees volcanic ash on the roofs of Catania, and Etna, Europe’s largest volcano. When Aneta Janúšková looks out of her window, she sees the mustard yellow housing blocks of Žilina, a city in Slovakia. When Rūta Švarcbaha in Riga looks out of her window, she sees the top of a beech tree and sometimes, if it's quiet enough, she can hear the flute, strumming, and singing from the music school. 

Three people scattered around Europe. They are divided by language and borders, the Mediterranean, the Alps, and the Carpathians. What unifies them: they are all young and will be voting for the first time on June 9.

More than 20 million people are voting for the first time this summer for the European Parliament. 2019, during the last election, voter participation was historically high, at 51 percent. That was largely due to the fact that many more young people voted than ever before. But why? What kind of future does the EU promise them, this complicated alliance of states that, in recent years, has been repeatedly declared disunited, incapable of action or sometimes even a failure?

There are some indications that a generation is growing up in Europe with a pessimistic outlook on their future. Recently, a foundation surveyed young Europeans between 16 and 26 years old. Every second person believed that their generation has a worse standard of living than their parents. Nearly half are worried about the state of democracy in their home country. And only every sixth respondent trusts in their government.

But in the survey was another finding: respondents' trust in the European institutions is twice as high. And if you ask them to guess the distance between the capital of their country and Brussels, they underestimate it. They feel close to Europe.

ZEIT ONLINE visited three young people in their home cities in Italy, Latvia, and Slovakia. They registered with ZEIT ONLINE to be part of the dialogue project "Europe Talks", which brings together Europeans for a conversation, and has invited first-time voters from every EU country to Berlin today. The three have already made the most important decision: they will be voting. Anyone who listens to them will understand that the EU is perhaps not quite so abstract. For Luca Riccioli, Aneta Janúšková and Rūta Švarcbaha, it means something absolutely concrete: hope.

Threatened homeland

Luca Riccioli honks the horn of his blue Opel Agila. A scooter passes him, narrowly missing his hood. The after-work traffic in Catania is chaotic, Riccioli must honk frequently as he drives down the Corso Italia to the sea. The street is lined with election posters, most with picture of Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the extreme right-wing party that controls the government. On one poster, written in red: Fascist. Shortly afterward, a pothole sends Riccioli bouncing in his seat. "Welcome to Sicily," he says.

"How could I leave here?"

Luca Riccioli is 19 years old. He was born and raised in Catania and lives with his parents. He is actually studying politics in Rome but he couldn’t find an apartment in the capital. When he has lectures he stays with his sister, who also studies there. This means that, six or seven times a semester, Luca Riccioli has to take a plan. It’s annoying, he says, that he has to do this to the environment. But with the train and the ferry, it takes ten hours to get to Rome.

Besides, he could never leave his life and his family in Sicily.

Down by the sea, the air tastes salty. Luca Riccioli orders a Tramavinda from a roadside stand, the Sicilian national drink made of simple syrup and soda. He points in the distance: behind a street of glowing red Bougainvillea rises Etna, its peak still covered in snow. "How could I leave here?"

"Did you know that, for us, this mountain is a ‘she’? We call her mother. She reminds me of my own mother because she protects everyone." He takes a sip of Tramavinda. "Sometimes, when I’m in Rome, I miss the mountain so much that it makes me cry."

Speaking about Europe or his parents makes his eyes light up. When he speaks of the mafia or Giorgia Meloni, his mouth narrows. What angers him the most is that the government under Meloni has not done enough about climate change. Sicily is challenged more and more by droughts. And rising sea levels are threatening the island. "All this," he says and and gestures broadly to the city, the sea, and the mountain, "all this could be lost to us. Just because we’re so ignorant."

1,300 kilometers north of Sicily, Aneta Janúšková stands angrily in front of a statue. The sun shines on a central plaza in Žilina, in the north-east of Slovakia. The memorial shows a benevolently smiling man in a priest’s frock with wide-outstretched arms. Aneta Janúšková snorts and slides her heart-shaped sunglasses back in her hair. "Why do we erect monuments to men like this?" she asks.

The statue is in honor of Andrej Hlinka, a Catholic priest who campaigned for Slovakian independence at the beginning of the twentieth century. He also paved the way for Slovakian fascists, who cooperated closely with the Nazis. The government of the time established the Hlinka Youth, modeled after the Hitler Youth. Today, Hlinka is regarded as a freedom fighter. "We have a scandalous culture of remembrance in this country," says Aneta Janúšková.

Aneta Janúšková is 18 years old. She will be graduating from high school this summer. Her interests in politics began with a boy band. At twelve years old, she was a fan of the British group One Direction. "I was always a Louis girl," she said. She didn’t go for the talented Harry Styles or the handsome Zayn, but rather Louis Tomlinson, the shy young man with the voice of an angel.

As her love for One Direction bloomed, she heard derisive gossip among classmates that the singers were dating each other. She was confused. "I thought to myself, what’s wrong about a man loving another man?" said Janúšková. She read about homophobia on the internet and was shocked: in more than 50 countries around the world, it’s forbidden to be gay? She read on. "Within a few years, I went from ‘One Direction is the best’ to ‘I want to fight for human rights.’"

Aneta Janúšková says she despairs that the politicians in her country are so corrupt. When she talks about Slovakia, she always sounds a bit ashamed. She says things like: "I don’t know whether we are worthy of Europe." In a country where top politicians in the parliament get into fistfights, it sometimes doesn’t feel that way.

"Our country is divided," says Aneta Janúšková. On May 15, Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, was shot and gravely wounded during an election event. He is now out of life-threatening danger. The government blames the opposition. "For the SNS, the political war begins here," Andrej Danko, the head of the national SNS party, cried into the microphone after the attack on Robert Fico. "We will no longer hold back. I would advise the opposition to go into hiding!" Janúšková supports the opposition. She wrote on WhatsApp about the assassination: "I don't like him as a person, nor do I like his politics. Although I understand the shooter's desperation, I am firmly against shooting anyone. We live in a democratic state and such violence has no place in democracy."

What does Aneta Janúšková when she thinks about her first European election? "Fear," she says. The current government under Robert Fico wants to leave the EU.

900 kilometers to the east, Rūta Švarcbaha stares silently at her laptop. The carpet in the Latvian National Library swallows every sound. Švarcbaha sits in the history section, in a seat by the window. To the left, the River Düna rushes silently by, but Švarcbaha pays it no attention. Concentrating, she skims over a document, her fingers pressed to her temples as if shielding herself from the rest of the reading room.

Rūta Švarcbaha is 19 years old. She is graduating from high school this year. Well, three high schools, actually: the state preparatory school, the international school, and a certificate in conducting from a music school. Švarcbaha says she has shed many tears over her studies during the past few months. Her mother suggested that she drop one of the degrees. "But I'm stubborn," she says. She wants to study at an international business school. She wants to give herself the best chance of getting a well-paying job. Five more weeks and she'll be done. Fifteen more exams and then she's free.

Rūta Švarcbaha lives in a country that has changed at breakneck speed since she was born. Until 1991, Latvia was a member of the Soviet Union and achieved independence for the first time after its collapse. In 2004, the year Švarcbaha came into the world, Latvia joined first NATO and then the EU. With the EU membership came funding, and with funding came highways, startups, school renovations. Rūta Švarcbaha speaks fluent English, she is the first in her family to go to preparatory school. The whole of Europe is open to her. If it weren’t for the war.

She slides back her chair and disappears between the stacks. She wanders between books about the Second World War, the USSR, and the Latvian presidents, thick tomes with creased covers. Next week she is writing a history exam. History that seems more relevant than she would like, these days.

On the other side of the river in the center of Riga, not far from her preparatory school, sits the Russian embassy, an art-nouveau building with barred-windows. Rūta Švarcbaha was there often in the past months to protest. Since the invasion of Ukraine, many Latvians fear that Russia could take back by force what the Soviet Union lost in 1991. Only a 104-kilometer border connects the three Baltic states, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, with the EU. On all other sides they are surrounded by Kaliningrad, Belarus, and Russia. Old world versus new world, East versus West, Russia versus Europe: all fronts meet in Riga. And Rūta Švarcbaha is in the middle of it all. "Everything makes me scared," she says, "naturally."

When young people are asked about what they want from the EU, the answers are often big words: more justice, less poverty, human rights, climate protection. These demands sound like progress toward a better world, or at least toward something "better than now". What motivates Aneta Janúšková, Luca Riccioli, and Rūta Švarcbaha in the spring of 2024 sounds rather like the opposite: they want to preserve what they already have.

Rūta Švarcbaha fears for the sovereignty of her country if Ukraine should lose the war. Aneta Janúšková fears that her country will not remain a democracy, it’s already losing that qualification due to the corruption and intolerance of its politicians. Luca Riccioli fears his country will break apart if it continues to sleep climate change. 

There are not even twenty. Their life is just beginning. They are studying, learning, and planning their future. And already there is the feeling that this future is something they are going to have to fight for.