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Police officers disperse protesters during riots in front of the House of Representatives building in Jakarta, Indonesia, on August 30, 2025.
Why Asia’s “Gen Z” revolts matter
Across South and Southeast Asia, something unusual is brewing.
Massive economic protests in Indonesia were inflamed in late August when a police car rammed into a taxi and killed the young driver. “Gen Z” demonstrators in Nepal earlier this month burned the parliament and forced the prime minister to resign. And this week in Timor-Leste, protestors – including many students – set cars ablaze in objection to a government plan to buy vehicles for politicians.
A common thread among widely different contexts? Young people are fed up with corruption by entrenched leaders. The Indonesian unrest was touched off when young people struggling with high living costs learned all 580 members of the House of Representatives were receiving a housing benefit – President Prabowo Subianto has replaced certain high-level ministers in a desperate bid to quell the unrest.
Protestors in Timor-Leste – including many students – fumed about a similar proposal in their country, where lawmakers already make 10 times the country’s median income. Nepal’s young people have suffered from a stagnant economy, and when the government banned most social media as part of a broader crackdown on speech, it tipped them over the edge, beginning what has been dubbed the “Gen Z revolt.”
These upheavals have only added to the pile of political crises in the region. Three weeks ago a court removed Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra from office over a deferential phone call with a leading Cambodian politician during a border dispute. Myanmar is in perpetual crisis as a military junta fights a grinding civil war against multiple armed groups. In the Philippines, the House speaker has just resigned over a corruption scandal amid a broader battle between two ruling families.
Though young people are at the heart of the latest protests in Indonesia, Nepal, and Timor Leste, it’s not an issue that’s specific to Southeast Asia, according to Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“I don’t think it has to do with the region,” Kurlantzick told GZERO. “You can see that in tons of other places around the world, young people are completely fed up with politics… The center is falling apart in all of these places.”
Though the domestic ramifications of each of these revolts are unclear – Prabowo remains in charge in Indonesia, while Nepal is still trying to determine its next leader – one thing is certain: the region’s collective foreign policy is now under strain, lacking any coherent vision at a time when the rivalry between United States and China is white hot.
“It definitely has an effect on regional politics and leadership,” said Kurlantzick. “You don’t have the region’s most-powerful countries being devoted to foreign or regional policy. That is a huge problem.”
This has major economic ramifications, as the countries are dealing with Washington and China on a one-to-one basis, weakening their bargaining position against these two superpowers.
“In the past, the 10 Southeast Asia states negotiated trade agreements with other powerful countries, like Japan and China.” Kurlantzick added. “They could have all worked together and rejected the Trump administration’s transshipment tariffs, and you have a billion people and huge exporters in this region, but they couldn’t.”
Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party speaks after Democrat Josh Stein won the North Carolina governor's race, in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., November 5, 2024.
Young Democrats look to bulldoze the old guard ahead of the midterms
As the Democrats start plotting their fight back into power in the 2026 midterms, Anderson Clayton has a suggestion about who should lead that fight.
“Young people have the energy and the mobility to reshape the party in ways which older generations, quite frankly, are not interested in.”
Clayton speaks with authority on this matter. At 27 years old, the North Carolina native is the country's youngest state party chair. She won the highest organizational position in the swing-state’s Democratic Party at 25.
And others are looking to follow her lead. In recent weeks, a handful of young Democrats have announced that they will be primarying powerful incumbents like 85-year old former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 80-year-old Rep. Jan Schakowsky, and 70-year old Rep. Brad Sherman – to name a few. The challengers are former staffers and progressive influencers in their 20s who say the party’s establishment is too old and out of touch to stand up to Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling our country piece by piece, and so many Democrats seem content to sit back and let them,” says 26-year-old Kat Abughazaleh from behind an oversized podcast microphone as she announces her Congressional campaign via TikTok. “It’s time to drop the excuses and grow a f*cking spine.”
There’s a history here, after all. The party still remembers how Joe Biden stayed in the presidential race until just three months before election day, despite concerns about whether his age was an electoral liability. Many young people in the party still aren't convinced that generational change is happening quickly enough.
“Our party’s greatest problem right now is that people aren’t stepping back enough and saying, ‘Maybe it's not my time anymore,’" says Clayton.
She has a point: The average age of Democrats in Congress is 59 – the party’s third oldest cohort since 1789. Despite Millennials and Gen Z emerging as the demographic power center in American politics, Baby Boomers still make up the largest share of representatives in Congress, making up 42.8% of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
From 2011 to 2024, there have been an average of 50 retirements per cycle. It is still early days, but so far just four members of the Senate and five members of the House of Representatives have announced they would not seek re-election in 2026. Meanwhile, two Democrats died in office in March.
Dr. Elaine Kamarck, senior electoral politics fellow at the Brookings Institution, expects to see a generational shift in 2026, but says that primary upsets might not be the main driver.
“In spite of all the talk, it is very, very, very rare for members of Congress to lose primaries,” she points out. “They almost never do. It's like 2% usually.”
However, she believes many older members are likely to step down of their own accord, especially if it seems like Democrats have a chance to retake control of Congress from Republicans.
“They have been serving for a long time and have a good sense of when it's time to go,” she says. “No one wants to be the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there are a lot of people concerned with serving too long and hurting their own party.”
But does age really matter? What’s clear is that young people approach politics differently than older voters. According to Pew Research Center, voters under 35 – who account for roughly 29% of the national electorate – are markedly less partisan than their elders and are broadly disillusioned with both parties.
“I think that we look at issues more than we do party affiliation,” says Clayton. “Painting things with a broad brush anymore isn’t going to get a young person out to the ballot box. It's going to have to be, ‘how are you going to fix this particular issue that's impacting my life?’”
The economy, cost of living, and housing dominated the list of policy concerns for young people in the 2024 election, followed by foreign policy and climate change.
Can the Dems win back young men? Any successful strategy to capture the youth vote will need to have a big focus on young men, 56% of whom voted Trump in 2024 – a 15 point gain from 2020. Clayton says she recalls hearing that young men felt like the only reason to vote Democrat was “because you were an ally to people that were not men,” rather than because the party was interested in their concerns.
Clayton says the Democrats need to rebrand to make young men see they are the “party of raising the minimum wage, and having the right to access housing when you graduate college or high school and not have to go into debt.”
In 2024, young men were significantly more likely than young women to say that economic issues like jobs and inflation were their biggest political issues, as well as immigration and foreign policy.
Potential presidential hopeful and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has begun directly appealing to young men, saying in her most recent State of the State address that her speech was directed “to all young people, but especially to our young men.”
While her speech celebrated the strides women have made in recent generations, including outpacing men in educational achievement, college enrollment, and home-buying, she also acknowledged that the flip side of that progress is a “generation of young men falling behind their fathers and grandfathers.”
What’s the missing piece in the Dem’s midterm makeover? National leadership. Many say the party is lacking a clear leader for the party to rally around – regardless of their age.
Currently, the most popular US politician is 83-year-old Bernie Sanders, who’s net favorability rating is +7 points, the highest of any prominent US political figure. In contrast, the party’s most powerful member, Chuck Schumer’s net approval rating stands at an abysmal -33, almost as unpopular as the Democratic Party itself, which stands at -35.
Sanders is currently on a popular cross country speaking tour that even included a gig introducing Grammy-nominated pop star Clairo at the Coachella music festival. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who is nearly half a century younger than Sanders, has made frequent appearances at these events too. She is currently polling ahead of Schumer and is allegedly considering challenging him in the primary.
It's too soon to tell whether AOC, Sanders, or another figure will emerge as a new leader of a party badly in need of a rebrand ahead of the 2026 midterms.
But back in North Carolina, Clayton knows what she wants to see.
“What I'm looking for most right now is not the age of the person that does it, but who's willing to step up and really be the fighter that the Democratic Party needs."
Since this piece was published, 80-year-old Sen. Dick Durbin -- a 5 - term Democrat from Illinois -- has announced that he will not seek reelection because of his age.