I was proud to vote for a pro-European list. But too many young people believe a hard-right narrative of never-ending catastrophe
My first ever time voting was joyous. I was a first-year student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and on the night of 4 November 2008 a small group gathered in a friend’s dorm room to watch the results come in. When the news networks called Ohio for Obama, we streamed out of the dorm and found that everyone else was doing the same, and that the “Freshman Quad” was an effervescent mass of cheers, dancing and drum circling.
There was a hint of that memory on Sunday when I walked into the primary school around the corner and voted for the first time as a French and European citizen. I grinned as I went to the table displaying stacks of differently coloured papers – each showing the face of the party leader on one side, and the “list” of associated candidates on the other. Inside a curtained voting booth, I carefully folded one of those papers, for Raphaël Glucksmann’s list, placed it inside a tan envelope that said “République Française” on the outside, and then dropped the envelope into a transparent box.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
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