Vijay, Zelensky and Macron: what their political appeal has in common for young voters

Other outsiders who changed election outcomes in the US but did not win themselves are third party candidates like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader. India has a proud history of such venerable ‘renegades’ like Subhas Chandra Bose, Jayaprakash Narayan and Chandra Shekhar.

I will focus on the more radical type of outsider politician: someone who comes from outside the established party system. There are many examples from around the world.

Adolf Hitler infamously led a fringe political party to power in Germany by manipulating a fragmented democratic system. Alberto Fujimori was a virtually unknown leader of a new party when he won the Peruvian presidency in 1990. Silvio Berlusconi leveraged his media empire to bypass the Italian party system and become Italy’s PM three times.

More recently, Emmanuel Macron won the French presidency in 2017 with his own new centrist movement. Volodymyr Zelensky, a TV actor and comedian with no political background, won the Ukraine presidency in 2019 by a landslide.

In 2023, Javier Milei, an economist and TV personality in Argentina, and Bernardo Arévalo, an academic and diplomat in Guatemala, became president by running against the established political order. Macron, Zelensky, Milei and Arévalo are still in power.

Vijay is the most recent Indian name on a list of people who seemingly came from nowhere to win against established parties. He emulated N.T. Rama Rao, who similarly won Andhra Pradesh more than four decades ago with the Telugu Desam party he had just created. Like Vijay, NTR was also a movie star. Though not as rapid or comprehensive in their victory, Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party can also be cited as an example.

Why are these outsiders able to win popular mandates despite operating outside the political system?

Simply put: being an outsider is the primary virtue of the outsider; they win because of it, not despite it. Outsiders are untainted by the problems of an existing system that is often perceived to be corrupt, elitist and indifferent to the challenges facing ordinary people.

Established political parties are frequently seen—regardless of ideological orientation—as machines run by hypocritical and self-dealing careerists. An outsider is not beholden to these vested interests, can sweep out the corrupt and inject new ideas and energy into a predictable process that only serves the interests of the powerful.

The outsider is also seen as ‘self-made’ in the sense that he has been successful in some field other than politics (such as business, law or entertainment) and has name recognition from that success. This quality of being self-made, true or not, is relentlessly burnished by the outsider. With skilful media management, it adds a mythic quality to the political contest, like David against Goliath. People can colour in whatever virtues they desire on a blank canvas.

An outsider can be especially appealing to new voters who are not yet committed partisans. In this ‘age of anger,’ the youth face unemployment, uncertainty and increasing competition for scarce resources. Spontaneous mass movements like the Arab Spring explode with youth energy but usually dissipate because these are leaderless movements.

In contrast, the outsider candidate solves the problem of leadership from the beginning. Instead of inchoate and rudderless anger, there is a person to represent and direct it. Instead of turmoil in the streets, we get an upheaval in voting booths.

Vijay’s story is a textbook example. A successful movie star with wide name recognition, he comes from a family in the movie business but is still considered self-made. He had no link with politics before he joined the fray. His party, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), is two years old. It was not expected to make much headway against Tamil Nadu’s established duopoly.

In fact, some suggested that he would not even win his own seat. The TVK won 35% of the votes and 108 assembly seats out of 234. The 18-39 age group makes up 42% of the Tamil Nadu electorate and it is estimated that TVK captured well over half those votes (but only one-fifth of the middle-aged and elderly vote). It was a youthquake, a firm repudiation of politics as usual by a demographic group that elders complain about (for being uninformed) but seem less afraid of change.

All over the Global South, there is a youth boom. This rising share of working age population is supposed to provide a ‘demographic dividend’ of increased economic growth.

Whether it does or not remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that youth dominance of the electorate is rising. They can upend political systems by agitating on the streets or at the voting booth, by handing power to charismatic outsiders who offer the hope of a new and as-yet uncorrupted politics.

The author is a professor of geography, environment and urban studies and director of global studies at Temple University.