Let’s look at the data – the results of this year’s Economics Olympiad organized by INESS, with over 6,500 high school students involved. We introduce 10 key findings concerning economic skills of the youth in Slovakia.
The street protests that have started in Tbilisi on June 20, 2019, became a direct result of the mistakes of Georgian officials and a brazen behavior of a Russian politician. The majority of Georgian people thinks that, first, Russia is dangerous and, second, we cannot be partners of Russia, and instead need more integration with Europe and NATO.
The Economics Olympiad was launched in 2017 with a participation of 4,000 high school students. This year, the competition enjoyed even more popularity with more than 5,300 contestants overall.
With videos, we can easily reach an audience of more than 10,000 people. More importantly, we are able to get in touch with young viewers from the 18-30 age group – which is the least politically active in public life.
The way youth’s votes will break between the opposition’s coalition and the Spring party may significantly affect the electoral programs and election campaigns of the autumn parliamentary election. In the meantime, we’re still in our bubble.
Unfortunately, in 2016, the populist Law and Justice government decided to reverse the reform – the pseudo-economic rationale was the infamous lump of labor fallacy. They wrongly claimed that lowering the retirement age would be a perfect tool to fight youth unemployment – retiring seniors would (in their opinion) leave their jobs for young Poles.
After the Brexit referendum more and more people started to realize how little we know and care about the political activity of the youth. The results made it clear: the youth have significantly different views on certain issues, but their absence from voting resulted in the victory for Brexit.
I don’t think that the youth want revolution. In these unstable times they rather want stability that no longer favours the mainstream populism, not taking responsibility for the future of the state, unkept promises and embarassing U-turns (career-like as well). Stability in which the political class is not moving further away from the reformatory attitude in the state of constant self-contempt.
