Young people, media and civic culture: Bulgaria and Romania meet the Gen Z and young millennials
A glimpse at the contradictions of the young generations in the two countries and the context in which they grow
By Vladimir Mitev
To be young is not a quality. A “young person” could mean many things. Yet popular culture, academic research and media tend to attribute certain qualities to specific generations. In the complex social game, the millennials and the Gen Z people attract attention as individuals, who are often having common beliefs or struggles across borders (e.g. on Palestine), common cultural consumption (what The Friends TV series was for my generation of people born in the 1980s, is perhaps Netflix for the next generations) or similar complains (like housing). But while the young people in Bulgaria and Romania scroll through the same TikTok videos and Netflix series as their peers in London or Berlin, beneath the global sameness, their lives are shaped by fragile democracies, deep inequality, and political cultures that often ignore them or use them without real empowerment it transformation taking place.
This text tries to reflect on the story of two generations – millennials and Gen Z – coming of age in two Southeastern EU countries, caught between apathy and activism, conservative populism and progressivism, smartphones and protest squares.
The young people at different speeds: cosmopolitans and locals
“Young people in Bulgaria live at different speeds,” – Mirela Petkova
In Bulgaria, inequality defines opportunity. Mirela Petkova, a freelance journalist and fact checker, describes the gap between cosmopolitan youth in Sofia and young people in rural areas struggling for survival.
She has studied in the Netherlands and worked across Europe, but she also knows the reality at home: “In smaller places, people often lack the enthusiasm for exploration outside Bulgaria. Yet I’ve also met very global, open-minded people in surprising places.”
Mirela is kind to others. But she acknowledges that her return to Bulgaria has faced her with hardship, because of the detached and unengaged local culture. She periodically travels in Bulgaria and abroad and that is how she keeps herself dynamic. Staying at one place confronts her with the characteristical stagnation of life in Southeastern Europe.
Across the Danube, Romanian journalist Andra Mureșan sees the same divide. “It’s difficult to generalize about this generation,” she says. “There are Gen Zs in rural areas who don’t have access to libraries or culture, and then those who study abroad. The diaspora is huge. Many young Romanians are growing up outside the country.”
Andra has been a successful young journalist with the youth cultural media Scena9. She is at the border of Gen Z and millennials, just like Mirela. And just like her Bulgarian colleague, she keeps looking for international projects and activities. Within the borders of Bulgaria or Romania, realities seem to have narrow limitations.
Civic spirit and social engagement: between crypto-democracy and protest energy
Bulgaria and Romania share EU membership, but their political cultures could not feel more different.
Romania ranks first in the 2024 Youth EU Barometer on the civic engagement of its young people. The country boasts of a number of grassroots movements – on housing, on Roma issues, political theater, neurodivergent movement, etc.
At the same time Bulgaria has been known throughout its last 3 decades as a country in which nothing can change bottom up. Social life is all about might, and political power is seen as the only possible source of problem resolution. Many people become members of political parties, not because of adherence to ideas, but because parties are networks for resolution of issues via access to power.
Zhanna Popova, a professor at Sofia University and expert on media, calls Bulgaria a “crypto-democracy.”
Zhanna Popova: “On paper, our institutions are perfect. In reality, they don’t work. Our public television is not truly public. Our regulations exist, but they fail in practice.”
Popova speaks about the tyranny of legalism. On paper all procedures are respected. But the ethical and civic spirit behind social action is lacking. That is how the director of the Bulgarian National Television can govern it legally for three years without having won a contest for his position, thanks to the fact that court cases are running on the procedure for his appointment.
Petkova sees the consequences of this impervious social political regime: political parties fail to address housing, social services or demographics, leaving young Bulgarians disillusioned.
As mentioned, Romania, by contrast, has seen more youth activism. A Eurobarometer survey found 57% of Romanian youth had taken action to change society in a year – the highest in the EU. But neither this data seems to create a lot of hype.
Mureșan is cautious about the figure. She says that young people often don’t report abuses in the universities. In her view it is exaggerated that young Romanians are so civic. Yet Andra admits NGOs and grassroots groups like Funky Citizens or Centre Filia have mobilized youth around elections, feminism, and civic oversight.
“Young people voted for Nicu Ștefănuță (who is now a member of the European Parliament – note of the editor), who talked about housing and mental health. That was significant,” she says. At the same time, she warns of polarization: many young voters supported sovereignist Călin Georgescu, and some idolize the controversial Tate brothers.
Media Habits: distrust, TikTok, and the podcast boom
One thing which united the two countries among themselves and with the world is that for young Bulgarians and Romanians, the smartphone is the real newsstand.
“We are very quick to reach for our phones, but we forget to use our intuition,” Petkova says. Even friends who experimented with “dummy phones” quickly returned, unable to stay out of the loop.
In this context the media expert Popova describes a media landscape in transition:
Zhanna Popova: “The program is dead. Young people don’t watch TV on TV sets, but they still watch television content – on phones, on Netflix, on YouTube.”
In Bulgaria, podcasts have become mainstream, replacing trust in TV news. In Romania, influencers like Twitch streamer Silviu Faiar or the Instagram project Politica La Minut have become more trusted voices than traditional media.
“Young people prefer information from people their own age, in their own language,” Andra Mureșan notes.
However, Popova notices that Bulgarian young content providers are too focused on technology and often don’t have what to say. She also speaks of gushing nationalism among the younger students, who have just come from high school. They might speak two or three foreign languages, but they don’t know what to use them for. Even if Journalism students start working for mainstream media, there is a deficit of role models and good practices. Young journalists learn journalist cliches. And rarely or almost never they manage to create lasting and durable proper media projects.
Youth media: passion and precarity
Both countries have sprouted youth-led media projects.
In Bulgaria, Factcheck.bg fights disinformation. Toest and Klin-Klin experiment with independent storytelling. Youth centers host debate clubs, clean-up campaigns, and photography projects. And STEM centers in the high schools have equipment for school media. There is in fact a sCOOL Media, where students practice writing journalist texts.
In Romania Scena9 and Decât o Revistă publish cultural journalism popular with young readers. Social media projects like Politica La Minut explain politics in accessible ways. And some influencers manage to capture the audience with storytelling and niche topics.
The biggest problem of youth media, both in Bulgaria and Romania is financial sustainability.
“Community media are hard to sustain,” Popova admits. “Technology is attractive, but you need something to say. Amateurism can undermine credibility.”
Populism and polarization
Economic precarity, deficient education and lack of civic culture tradition makes both Bulgarian and Romanian youth susceptible to populism.
“Populists are good storytellers,” Petkova warns. “They offer scapegoats to people who are unhappy with their lives.”
In Romania, some young men see the Tate brothers as role models. Others join Palestine solidarity protests or feminist campaigns. The same generation is split between progressive activism and nationalist rhetoric.
In Bulgaria, surveys suggest many young people support liberal, pro-European values, while others lean toward nationalist organizations. The divisions mirror broader European polarizations.
Conclusion
For all their contradictions, young Bulgarians and Romanians are not absent from public life. Apart from studying and working, they are creating podcasts, protesting in solidarity with Palestine, cleaning up their cities, and fact-checking disinformation.
But they are also navigating fragile democracies, expensive housing, failing schools, and populist noise. They are both hopeful and exhausted.
As Popova puts it: “Democracy is not built once during protests. It is built every day in institutions that work.”
For now, those institutions often fail. Romania annulled its December 2024 presidential elections out of fear of foreign meddling in its election process and rise of the extreme right. Bulgaria has had for years protests and contestation over its prosecution office, which some claim to be doing anti-corruption in “an unreformed way”. Students in both countries fare poorly in the PISA examinations and there are great levels of functional illiteracy and school abandon.
Yet the youth or some young people – as we see from the examples of Mirela Petkova and Andra Mureșan and not only – through their media, their protests, their digital communities – are sketching the outlines of something new. There are cases where young people can turn out to be more mature, more aware and able than their corrupt and compromised parents.
The young people in both countries need to walk their own way, but their transformational potential should be identified and supported, rather than annihilated by elders. Change is out there.
“This article was created as part of PULSE’s Thematic Networks, a European initiative supporting cross-border journalistic collaborations Marta Abbà, Alice Facchini, and Odysseas Grammatikakis collaborated.“
Photo: (source: Pixabay, CC0)
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