A Reflection on Young People’s Understanding of Politics and Political Orientation in Slovenia in the Era of Neoliberal Rationality

The article examines media and research accounts of alleged turn to the right among young people in Slovenia. Rather than treating this shift in moral terms as evidence of an inadequate understanding of politics, research with young people is drawn on to analyse how different groups understand politics and how they position themselves on the left– right spectrum. Using a Foucauldian analytics of government, young activists are shown to understand politics in systemic terms, and through a critique of the neoliberal order, young politicians chiefly in institutional terms and within the existing neoliberal rationality, and apolitical young people on the individual level, through ideals of the good life. While their left–right positioning does not indicate an unequivocal turn to the right among young people, it does show differences in their political and social engagement. We understand young people’s political orientations as situated processes of subjectivation within neoliberal relations of power, thereby moving the discussion from moralising judgements towards analysis of the conditions that produce these orientations.