‘There are no normal people here’: the youth verdict on the rightwing Davos

"So will you write that it was full of far-right extremists?" asks the young man. Big blue eyes, Andy Burnham eyelashes. His friend has just asked my friend if he can pray for her. He's an evangelical Christian, but there's no bitterness in his voice when I reveal I’m on the left. 

I spent the last three days at ARC 2026. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference is a conservative convention, now in its third year, that took place at Olympia in west London. It was founded by Conservative peer Philippa Stroud, Jordan Peterson and the Dubai-based investment group Legatum, with GB News owner Paul Marshall closely involved.

This week, the conference agenda focused on young people and their problems. Speakers such as Sophie Winkleman, the beloved Peep Show star, spoke about the AI plague affecting students; Nick Freitas, the Republican influencer, explained how society has failed our boys. Kemi Badenoch decried net zero stealing young people’s future in the hottest week of the year, and Nigel Farage, a divorced man, reminded us that children are simply better off in married households. 

Yet young voices were curiously absent from the main stage. The conference has been covered by many mainstream media outlets, and not just the usual suspects. The Telegraph ran live coverage, and Times Radio set up a full studio on site, broadcasting vox pops throughout. The speakers were big names of the global right and the Maga-industrial complex. There were rightwing politicians from all over the world, including Trump’s administration, the AfD in Germany, and other far-right parties across Europe. The usual Tufton Street libertarian thinktanks, media outlets such as “The Common Sense” from South Africa, lobbyists from the alcohol, tobacco and pharma industries, and rightwing influencers and intellectuals. 

The speakers ranged from New York Times columnists Arthur Brooks and Ross Douthat to former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, Reform UK’s head of policy and theologian James Orr, and political scientist Eric Kaufmann. Plus the usual suspects: Charles Moore, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Claire Fox, Danny Kruger, Katharine Birbalsingh, Matt Ridley, Matthew Elliott, Matthew Syed, Maurice Glasman, Michael Gove, Melanie Phillips and Toby Young. The entire Spectator WhatsApp group, basically. 

Given the conference’s aim of targeting a young demographic, I spent three days interrogating those who came to ARC, trying to work out what they make of it all: why they're here and what they hope to get out of it.

The conference doesn’t scream youth. It’s expensive (£450 per ticket with a 70% discount!), impossible for most young people to afford. Most of those that do go are approached with offers of free tickets because of their involvement with other societies, such as Conservative and Reform student groups. The organisers claim more than 71 nationalities and 4,000 participants, of whom 1,000 are “young leaders” – unlikely numbers by looking around. There is a dress code, smart or business casual, and most err on the side of formal, despite the heatwave. Between sessions on the main stage, a live band plays classical music. The main themes are western civilisation (collapse), family and community, free enterprise, and technology’s potential and impact. 

I'm introduced to a middle-aged academic described as a eugenicist. His eyes look sad, but his tone is cheerful; he offers to “say eugenicist things on camera” for my vox pop. I resist the temptation to platform the most extreme person I can convince to speak to me. Instead I seek out some young attendees with some less caricatured views.

Leonardo Fennell is 21 and has just graduated in philosophy from Exeter. He runs an event called Our Culture: three days in which young people discuss philosophy and learn ballroom and traditional European dances. The idea came to him as he reflected on how his peers reacted whenever he mentioned his degree. "Rather than joking that I'll never find a job, they'd launch straight into their favourite philosophical concept. They seemed hungry to connect over these ideas, but had nowhere to do it." He sounds exactly like the agentic, communitarian, conscientious young man the speakers at this conference want to cultivate, which makes me curious about what he makes of them.

Leo is no clapping seal. He bristles when a speaker declares "This is the truth!" and the room applauds. "I understand that when you speak to a crowd, you have to make your point digestible. But when people go on about the liberals this, the liberals that, they're destroying the world, we're winning … maybe there's a grain of truth in it, but things are more complicated than that." He is wary, too, of the conference's undercurrent of faith. "I don't think these are bad people. But I worry that Christianity can be weaponised. The moment you tie a political position to the teachings of the Bible, you can use it to sway people. I watch for that." I recommend he looks up James Talarico, a telegenic American politician who rebuts Christian ethnonationalists’ interpretation of Christianity. 

In the "Young Leaders" corner, everyone given a free ticket is herded to be talked at by journalists like me. I said I wanted to interview some young people. Men my own age kept presenting themselves. A besuited 31-year-old Italian, the international secretary of the youth wing of Giorgia Meloni's party, a conservative organisation apparently part-funded by the EU. Until now I'd been interviewing people sitting on the floor, taking notes on my knees. He leads me to a pair of chairs, and an Italian cameraman clips a microphone to my lapel. I quickly realise the language barrier and the rehearsed lines make this conversation pointless, but I feel obliged to keep up the pretence of interviewing him, for the benefit of the camera he's shipped in from Rome. Someone should tell Farage this is where our EU money used to go. 

"Me next," announces Zindi Anthony Levi, with a smile so winning I can't bring myself to tell him that, at 32, he doesn't count as a youth either. He is an associate staff member at the Gambian High Commission, and wrote his thesis on the EU's response to the 2015–23 migration crisis from a global-south perspective. He was invited because of his embassy work. 

"They invite anyone connected to politics," he tells me. Of all the speeches, he liked Paul Marshall's “100-year History of Woke”: human-focused, he says, concerned with what each of us can contribute as individuals. I'm curious why that lands for him, and whether, as an immigration researcher and an African immigrant, he's troubled by the anti-immigration arguments running through the conference. He isn't: the people who make them, he says, only ever look at the piece of paper, never at what the individual might contribute. I think of the ARC mug on the merch stand, £9, stamped with "Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve." 

Someone who is definitely a youth is Ellie Hodges – just 18 and yet already fighting her way on live political panels. She got into politics as a teenager, watching TalkTV clips on YouTube. She started building up work experience and filming mock interviews for her socials. When she turned 16, Nigel Farage's office messaged her on Instagram to offer an internship. Reform is where she sits most naturally, but her real ambition is media, ideally presenting on GB News or TalkTV. She already carries herself like a mini celebrity. I first met her on Matt Goodwin's TV show, where I'd been cast as the leftwinger and she the right. Was that intimidating, I ask. 

"You have to be a bitch, you know, especially as a woman." She hadn't come across that way at all. "It's a very male-dominated field, and if you're young, people try hard to influence you. Some on the right can be very one-dimensional. I said I felt a bit sorry for Keir Starmer, and the right came for me. Some people on GB News pick up the line and just repeat it forever." Does she think events like this convert anyone? No. "There are no normal people here, just people with a lot of money, or thinktanks… and a lot of young Americans”. She'd been in Makerfield for the byelection and found herself envying the young people canvassing for Andy Burnham: they'd put loud music on, they looked like they were having fun. And the music here? Between sessions, a live orchestra plays classical. "It sends you to sleep," she laughs.

On the main stage, and in the films screened between sessions, the economic argument is insistent. One film, on what it calls the economic “nihilism” of the young, concedes, by paraphrasing Charlie Kirk, that the economy genuinely isn't working for them and the diagnosis on offer is that the system is broken not by capitalism but by over-regulation. 

Offstage, the youths have their own version of the grievance. Wolfgang, 26, first heard about ARC through an event called Witan, held in Warwick in 2024. It was controversial for the far-right speakers it hosted, a fact the university only discovered too late. He met someone there who hooked him up with a free ARC ticket. This year he paid €500, but when I catch up with him at the end of the second day, he's been to none of the talks. He's here to socialise; he doesn't much care what's said on stage. 

He's from Vienna but spends his time here with a crowd of Germans from the AfD, a lot of whom come, he says, because there's nothing like this back home. How come? "Antifa would block it." He, however, belongs to no party. None of them represents what he actually cares about, he says. And what's that, I ask and put my best poker face on, expecting the obvious answer. Immigration, surely? No: "Boomers are taking far too much money. We're redistributing resources from the young to the old." This event, he says, is a boomerocracy, but a useful one: "Perfect cover for young people to meet, because we don't have the money to put on something like this ourselves."

At conferences like this, it's easy to go for the cheap shot. Find the man in the three-piece suit in the middle of a heatwave, ask him whether climate change is real, and there's your headline – despite how hard some fringe far-right figures try to turn themselves into caricatures to cash in on an algorithm built to spin them ever more extreme. 

It isn't an organic movement; it's an artificial coalition that smooshes together people with competing interests: the precarious young and the bored old, tech billionaires and anxious parents, fanatical believers and gentle pluralists, libertarians and authoritarians. They're made to dance together like bears at a fair, because someone is paying for them to be here, to drink here, to clap. And so they perform the mental gymnastics required to cast Davos as a far-left conspiracy, and to reassure us that capitalism was never the problem. 

The result is an ultra-conservative-looking movement that expresses the utmost concern for young people but offers few solutions to tackle generational financial inequalities and to stop the tech oligarchy that is hell-bent on letting AI ruin so many of the things the conference claims to value: intellectual rigour, financial independence, human relationships and art. It also assumes young people share its contempt for feminism, anti-racism and environmental protection. 

The problem is that, for some speakers and attendees, they are both the creators of and the solution to the problems the young face today. Why can’t people buy a house? Find a job? Socialise with their friends in public spaces? Was the housing ladder pulled up by woke undergraduates? Did rainbow lanyards drain the investment out of the public realm? Or has it always been simpler than that: donor interests put before the interests of the young everyone here claims to be so worried about.

Stella Tsantekidou is a political commentator and a former parliamentary aide for several Labour frontbenchers. She writes The Human Carbohydrate, a political and cultural diary on Substack