It's about as strange as American youth supporting Ron Paul though whereas the Paul supporters are mostly just annoying, the Le Pen supporters are barking mad. (What is it that makes young Paul supporters so completely unlikable?) With high unemployment now and in the future, it's understandable enough that the youth are supporting an extremist candidate, but Le Pen?
It's never good when the youth are so supportive of racist politicians but this is also what happens when a country fails to address its problems of addressing race. The US still has a serious race problem, but compared to Europe, the US is a few decades ahead. The Guardian:
The leader of the Front National has the support of 26% of voters aged 18 to 24, according to a survey for Le Monde, with the Socialist Francois Hollande on 25%, Nicolas Sarkozy on 17% and the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon on 16%.
Le Pen has led a fierce public relations drive to style herself as more palatable, modern figure than her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was recently convicted of contesting crimes against humanity for saying the Nazi occupation was not "particularly inhumane".
Capitalising on the working-class and protest vote, she has risen in popularity among young people – mainly those from poorer backgrounds – partly because of France's crippling youth unemployment problem, which has fuelled suggestions that what scarce jobs exist should be for the French first, not immigrants. In the 1990s, her father scored well among young people who felt they had no prospects.
