Building on these assessments of societal challenges and life chances, participants turn to the question of political responsibility and institutional performance. Their reflections on political actors are closely intertwined with the crises they previously described. Parties and politicians are evaluated primarily in terms of their perceived capacity to respond effectively to economic insecurity, social inequality, polarisation and geopolitical instability. While ideological orientations and partisan preferences are present, they do not structure the discussion in a straightforward left-right manner. Rather, political actors are assessed through a performance-based lens: do they deliver; do they cooperate; and do they meaningfully address the problems shaping young people’s lives? Participants do not uniformly approach political actors from a position of detachment or indifference. For some, clear partisan preferences and identifiable ideological positions are evident. These participants articulate distinct views on policies and parties and were able to situate themselves within recognisable political camps. Ideological lines matter, particularly when discussing welfare policy, migration, climate or gender equality. At the same time, others appear markedly alienated from party politics as such. For them, party labels carry little substantive meaning, and political competition was perceived less as a contest between alternatives and more as a repetitive and self-referential system. Thus, structured ideological positioning and diffuse alienation coexist within the same generational cohort. 3.3.1 Broken promises, fragile trust and unproductive polarisation: Political parties’ lack of output legitimacy in the eyes of young adults Across both groups, a shared evaluative standard emerges: political actors are expected to produce tangible output and to avoid unproductive or even “destructive” polarisation. 55 The most common critique focused on the gap between promises and results. Participants often criticised political disagreements that seemed performative, mere theatre, without producing concrete actions or meaningful outcomes. In Germany, Vanessa(female, 24, Berlin, mixed group) expresses disappointment while maintaining democratic commitment: “You sometimes get election promises, that are sometimes not enforced or can’t be kept. But I have no alternative now. I would never not vote. I would still vote and hope for the best”. Her statement illustrates a pragmatic form of engagement: trust in specific actors is fragile, yet participation remains normatively binding. Emre(male, 28, Berlin, all-male group) describes how repeated non-implementation erodes emotional investment: “Personally, I just find it sad that people always approach things like this[elections] with an idea or a hope. You want to move something, you want to change something and then you always vote for the party, and all the election promises are not kept, for example. And that makes you sad and that leads to fewer people voting because they think that nothing will change anyhow.” Here, broken promises are not merely procedural failures; they undermine belief in the transformative potential of politics. A similar perception emerged in Greece. Stelios(male, 23, Athens, mixed group) characterises political communication as structurally unreliable: “The‘fairy tale’ goes entirely with the political situation; I feel that you can’t trust what they say – whatever they promise won’t be implemented”. The metaphor of the“fairy tale” captures a profound scepticism toward political speech itself. In Poland, Kacper(male, 29, Warsaw, all-male group) frames the issue in terms of systematic underperformance: EqualiZe 59